WASHINGTON – The telecom bust of the last decade only served to hasten the offshoring of U.S. optoelectronics manufacturing to Asian countries like Thailand. As with other technology sectors, industry leaders are becoming increasingly restive about a shrinking manufacturing base in an electronics sector that provides ever-increasing amounts of secure bandwidth over long distances.
Alarmed by this exodus, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan decided it was time to do something to stem the erosion of the optoelectronics manufacturing base. Gopalakrishnan, an engineer trained at Texas Tech and executive technical director at the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association, based here, picked up the phone and started lining up a panel of speakers for a workshop highlighting the manufacturing decline at a recent industry conference in Los Angeles. The panel, made up of experts from industry, academia and government agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) concluded that “it was clear that something needs to be done” to reverse the decline in optoelectronics manufacturing, Gopalakrishnan said in an interview.
Ganesh Gopalakrishnan