OIP 2026 Program

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C. Thomas Gray received the B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics from Mississippi College, Clinton, MS and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. From 1993 to 1998, he was an Advisory Engineer with IBM, Research Triangle Park, NC working on transceiver design for communication systems. From 1998 to 2004, he was a Senior Staff Design Engineer with the Analog/Mixed Signal Design Group, Cadence Design Systems, working on SerDes system architecture. From 2004 to 2010, he was a Consultant Design Engineer with Artisan/ARM and Technical Lead of SerDes architecture and design. In 2010, he joined Nethra Imaging as a System Architect. His work experience includes digital signal processing design and CMOS implementation of DSP blocks as well as high-speed serial link communication systems, architectures, and implementation. In 2011, he joined NVIDIA, Inc., Durham, NC where he is currently Senior Director of Circuit Research leading activities related to high-speed electrical signaling, photonics, security circuits, low-energy and resilient memories, circuits for machine learning, variation-tolerant clocking, and power delivery.

Ram Huggahalli is a Principal Hardware Engineer in Microsoft’s Azure Hardware and Systems Infrastructure organization. As part of the Strategic Planning and Architecture function within this organization, he leads the Optical Technology Pathfinding team that is evaluating emerging optical technologies for AI and Cloud DC applications. Prior to this role, Ram was part of the Microsoft Cobalt processor team contributing to its I/O architecture. Ram also worked for Intel on many projects spanning memory, server networking and large scale HPC fabrics with contributions to Intel Xeon processors and Omni-Path Architecture. Ram holds 20 patents and a Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Management from the University of Missouri.

Di Liang is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining academia, he served as a Director at Alibaba Cloud Computing (US) to lead the development of silicon photonic 100G/lane DR4/DR8 transceiver product in 2021-2023. From 2009 to 2021, he was a research scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs and led advanced research in heterogeneous integrated photonics for energy-efficient optical interconnects in high-performance computing systems. He has (co-)authored one edited book, seven book chapters, over 360 journal and conference publications, and over 10,000 citations. He holds more than 70 issued patents, with several dozen pending. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Optica.