2025 Outlook with Matt Burns of Samtec

My good friend Matthew Burns develops go-to-market strategies for Samtec’s Silicon-to-Silicon solutions. Over the course of 25 years, he has been a leader in design, applications engineering, technical sales and marketing in the telecommunications, medical and electronic components industries. Matt holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Samtec is a privately held, global manufacturer of a broad line of high-performance copper, optical, and RF interconnect solutions. Our technical experts around the globe optimize the signal path from the bare die to an interface 100 meters away, and all interconnect points in between. I lead an experienced team of professionals who evangelize the capabilities of Samtec’s Silicon-to-Silicon solutions.

What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company?

Throughout the year, Samtec was able to demonstrate the high-speed capabilities of several next-gen interconnect platform solutions. Even at 224 Gbps PAM4 speeds, copper isn’t dead.  Samtec’s Flyover® Next-Gen Systems route data from the ASIC to the front panel (or backplane) via our Eye Speed® Cable Technology. At SC24, we exhibited the latest versions of our Si-Fly® HD co-packaged and near chip systems driven by Synopsys IP with a pre-FEC BER of e-9 over a 40 dB channel. On the optical side, our demonstrated 56 Gbps PAM4 performance of our Halo™ next-gen mid-board optical transceivers.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2024? 

I talked with several colleagues throughout the year. All of us agreed that innovation is speeding up. We anticipate that will continue going forward. The near insatiable demand for GPUs, XPUs, and AI accelerators by the hyperscalers remains the key driving force here. Semiconductor suppliers, IP providers, EDA vendors and interconnect companies like Samtec must meet their design requirements on-time and under budget. That sounds common sensical, but the combined technology required to scale AI at the pace the industry demands is unprecedented.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge? 

Samtec is innovating faster as well. We are ramping up our engineering hiring. It’s just a necessity. Unique design challenges demand unique interconnect solutions. Our technical experts are improving the SI performance across the new signal channels. We are creating next-gen mated contact systems to enable 224 Gbps PAM4 performance in dense, small footprints. We constantly tweak our twinax cable technology by testing new dielectric materials, improving cable manufacturing, or developing new cable testing techniques. Our SI engineers are always researching the latest laminates to recommend for high-speed or high-frequency design. We work with our partners to squeeze more performance out of simulation tools. The list goes on.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2025 will be, and why?

In short, we can’t manufacture micro coax and twinax copper cables fast enough. The adoption of Samtec’s Flyover® technology across networking, computing, storage, and AI acceleration platforms throughout data center, supercomputing systems, and semiconductor testing and manufacturing applications continues to be the driver here. We are also seeing increased demand for our growing portfolio mid-board optical transceivers across several applications.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth? 

As mentioned, we continue to invest in innovation. On the copper cable side, we need to find to materials with the lowest dK available. That has led us to researching, developing and finally manufacturing twinax cable based on uniformly foamed dielectrics. Cable diameters need to be smaller, so finding thinner cable wraps is a necessity. We are expanding cable manufacturing globally. Additionally, we have standard cable assemblies, but our customers usually require something unique. We need to balance supporting emerging R+D opportunities while handling high-volume needs of programs already in production. On the optical side, its more of the same story: ramp innovation and ramp production.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

Samtec sponsors, exhibits, and presents at more than 50 tradeshows and conferences annually around the glove.  Some of the shows I attended included OFC, the OCP Global Summit, MemCon, various PCI-SIG DevCons, ECOC, embedded world, SuperComputing (SC24), and the AI Hardware and Edge AI Summit. From Samtec’s perspective and personally, attendance at tradeshows is still on an upward trend. That’s been the case that last few years coming out of the pandemic.  However, I think the accelerating pace of innovation in AI, semiconductors, EDA, optical connectivity, and other high-growth areas are defining this trend.  I expect this to continue into 2025

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

Yes, without a doubt. Conference and events are still a great way to meet luminaries, thought leaders, influencers, design engineers and the like. We are still finalizing our 2025 event strategy and scheduling.  Overall, we will probably attend more vents in 2025. We will likely be on par in the Americas and EMEA, while we strategically invest a bit more across Asia.

How do customers engage with your company?

That’s a great question. As I just mentioned, we still meet plenty of new customers as conferences. Engineers can engage with us directly via our global sales team or our global network of approved distributors. Technically, our FAEs, AEs, and SI engineers are only a phone call or e-mail away. Our website – www.samtec.com – is a treasure trove of product information. We are also accessible via our social media channels.

Additional questions or final comments? 

It’s always nice to engage with you and you team, Dan. We always appreciate the opportunity.  I am sure the year ahead will pose many opportunities and challenges. Samtec looks forward to working with our customers and partners to solve their next-gen interconnect challenges.

About Samtec

Founded in 1976, Samtec is much more than just another connector company. We put people first, along with a commitment to exceptional service, quality products and innovative technologies that take the industry further faster. This is enabled by our unique, fully integrated business model, which allows for true collaboration and innovation without the limits of traditional business models.

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