News: Optoelectronics
18 April 2023
Salience hires former Imagination Technologies chief product officer
Silicon photonics company Salience Labs of Oxford, UK has appointed semiconductor industry veteran Chris Porthouse as chief product officer.
Spun out from the University of Oxford and Germany’s Münster University in 2021, Salience has developed an ultra-high-speed, super-low-latency multi-chip processor that packages a novel photonics chip with standard electronics to accelerate exponential advances in AI and other compute-intensive applications.
Porthouse has a track record of growing and transforming businesses, most recently as CPO for Imagination Technologies and previously as VP & general manager at Arm. At Imagination he delivered the annual five-year strategy and business plan, and the roadmap of GPU, AI and CPU products licensed to mobile, consumer, data-center and automotive customers worldwide. At Arm, Porthouse delivered significant growth in Mali GPU, helping win first deals worldwide and latterly in cloud services.
As CPO, Porthouse will lead Salience Labs’ product strategy and product-market fit, as the business scales following its $11.5m seed funding round in 2022. The firm is funded by investors including Cambridge Innovation Capital, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, Oxford Investment Consultants, Silicon Catalyst, Deeptech Labs and leaders from the global semiconductor industry including Dialog Semiconductor’s former CEO Jalal Bagherli and the Goh Family Office in Singapore.
“Salience Labs will bring high-speed, low-latency, efficient photonics compute to market at scale,” says Porthouse. “I am excited to join this phenomenally talented team as we enter a new phase of growth and leverage our differentiated photonics multi-chip architecture to enable applications beyond the horizon of the established CMOS roadmap,” he adds.
“Chris has over 25 years’ experience in the semiconductor industry across a range of markets,” notes co-founder & CEO Vaysh Kewada. “His proven leadership and experience in developing novel compute solutions that solve customer problems will enable us to usher in a new era of ultra-high-speed, super-low-latency processing where supercompute applications become ubiquitous”.
