As the market for silicon photonics heats up, silicon photonics innovator Kotura has appointed Samir Desai as vice president of business development to oversee expansion of Kotura's strategic relationships and business development activities in the rapidly expanding market of optical interconnects. Desai brings to Kotura well-rounded expertise in business development, strategic marketing/sales and account management in the enterprise optics market.

"Samir's extensive experience in enterprise optics makes him a great fit for Kotura," said Jean-Louis Malinge, president and CEO of Kotura. "At a time when all of the key market players are evaluating the tradeoffs between electrical and optical interconnects, Samir will be instrumental in expanding our partnerships and strategic relationships in the data center and high performance computing markets."

"With its low-power, compact size and WDM scalability, Kotura's 100 Gb/s optical engine offers the best silicon photonics solution," said Desai. "I look forward to working with the Kotura team as we unlock the company's full potential to develop integrated optoelectronic solutions that provide increased processing speed, reduced heat and energy consumption, and lower costs."

Most recently, Desai was responsible for active optics global business development at TE Connectivity. He has led two business acquisitions -- one for Primarion Opto Group to Zarlink Semiconductor in 2006, the other for Zarlink's optical communication group to TE Connectivity in 2010. Desai started his career at QLogic Corp., where he held several growing responsibilities in applications engineering, product marketing, and leading the fiber channel marketing group. Desai holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from California State University, Fullerton.

As a leader in silicon photonics, Kotura devices have reliably logged more than one billion channel hours of operation. The company has 140 issued and applied patents.