ECE Seminar Series – May 9 (Fri) @ 2:00 PM: "Connecting the AI Factory," Mario Milicevic, Senior Principal Engineer, MaxLinear

Location: Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
Come at 1:30p for Cookies, Coffee and Conversation!
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE at the ECE SEMINAR SERIES

Abstract

Modern AI workloads are changing the way that datacenters are architected to support low-latency communication across thousands of distributed GPUs, TPUs, and custom inference ASICs. In this talk, we'll explore the role of optical interconnects and other key enabling technologies that are helping usher in the era of the AI Factory. Specifically, we'll focus on how electro-optical integration in the network can help alleviate some of the power consumption and cooling challenges, while also enabling higher bandwidths to support scale-up and scale-out paradigms.

Bio

Mario Milicevic is a senior principal engineer at MaxLinear, where he serves as the technical lead and system architect for MaxLinear’s latest “Rushmore” 1.6Tb/s PAM4 DSP transceiver, which was recently unveiled at the OFC tradeshow in April 2025, enabling 200Gb/s per wavelength intra-datacenter optical communication. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, where his research previously focused on energy-efficient hardware/silicon implementations of LDPC error-correction decoders for wireless applications and quantum cryptography.

Hosted by: Distinguished Lecture at the ECE Seminar Series

Submitted by: B.S. Manjunath <manj@ucsb.edu>