Masatoshi Suzuki

Professor Masatoshi Suzuki received BE, ME and PhD degrees in electronics from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, in 1979, 1981 and 1984, respectively. He joined KDD (currently KDDI), Tokyo, Japan, in 1984. He was promoted to R&D Fellow of KDDI Corporation in 2007, Executive Vice President of KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc. in 2011, and President of KDDI Foundation in 2018. Currently he is the Vice President and professor of Chitose Institute of Science and Technology and the visiting professor of Waseda University. 

During his career at KDDI, Suzuki has made seminal contributions to the sustained progress of long-haul high-capacity optical communication systems through his pioneering and innovative research from optical devices, systems and networks. Key results included the first demonstration of the semiconductor integrated circuit, EML (Electroabosorption Modulator integrated Laser), required for high-speed optical communications, and the invention of dispersion managed soliton which enabled high-speed long-haul optical transmission. He demonstrated the first high-speed low-chirp EA modulators and EMLs in 1985 and 1987, respectively. The EML was the first semiconductor optical IC realized after 29 years from the first electronic IC. His pioneering research has led to the current worldwide deployment of EMLs. 

In 1995, Suzuki proposed and demonstrated the dispersion managed solitons, which was newly founded physical phenomenon of stable pulse propagation over nonlinear fiber enabling high-speed long-haul optical communication, e.g. 40Gbit/s over 10,000km transmission.  The dispersion managed soliton is a soliton-like chirped Gaussian pulse and a periodically stationary solution of nonlinear Schrödinger equation of general dispersion managed nonlinear fibers.  With the technology, he and the international team of ATT-SSI (later TE-SubCom) and KDDI groups succeeded in the first demonstration of 10 Gbit/s based WDM transmission over 10,000km in 1998.  It was extended to 1Tbit/s over transoceanic transmission with advanced dispersion managed fibers in 1999. These technologies have been applied to most of commercial Tera bit/s class transpacific and transatlantic submarine cables including Japan-US and TAT-14 as well as Asian regional submarine cable systems. As a result, a 200-fold increase in capacity for transoceanic submarine cable systems, underpinning the global Internet and the telecommunications infrastructure and supporting its growth, was realized within 10-years.  

Suzuki co-founded the EXAT Initiative focusing on spatial multiplexing in 2008 to promote a new research field to overcome the coming transmission capacity limit of conventional single-core fibers. Suzuki and his team have led the world’s first demonstrations of the transoceanic multicore fiber transmission with exceeding 1 Exa bit/s-km capacity-distance product in 2013 and the highest fiber capacity of over 10 Pbit/s in 2017. 

Besides these works, Suzuki has demonstrated outstanding achievements in the field of terrestrial optical networks, such as nation-wide all optical networks based on GMPLS-controlled optical cross connects, high-capacity WDM PON and over 10Tbit/s high-capacity radio over fiber for beyond 5G mobile networks.  His current research interest includes high-speed free-space communications for non-terrestrial networks using high power PCSELs and Silicon photonics for optical computing. 

Through these works, Suzuki has co-authored 5 books and more than 420 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and produced 120 registered International Patents. He has received various awards for his research over the years, including the Best Paper Awards from OEC 1988, IEICE 1996 and OECC 2000, Achievement Award, Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award and three IEICE Milestone Awards from IEICE, Minister Awards from MEXT and METI in Japan, Kenjiro Sakurai Memorial Prize, Hisoka Maejima Award, Medal with purple ribbon from Emperor in Japan in 2017, Ichimura Prize in industry in 2018, Telecom System Technical Award in 2021, and C&C Prize in 2024. He was an elected member of Bord of Governors of IEEE Photonics Society and the Auditor of IEICE. He is currently a chairman of Photonic Internet Forum.  He is a Life Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of Optica, and a Fellow and Honorary member of IEICE. He is the 2025 John Tyndall Award recipient, "for pioneering and seminal contributions to large capacity long-haul optical communication systems including integrated light sources, dispersion-managed soliton, WDM submarine cable systems, and spatial multiplexing."