Review on the status of optical interconnect technology

The emergence of parallel switching and computational architectures are being technologically constrained by conventional electrical interconnects. The parallel nature of these new architectures have shifted the burden for increased throughput from increasing the device speeds to increasing the throughput of the communications between the many parallel switching nodes or processing elements. Some of the applications driving this demand are: video-on- demand, large database machines, high-definition television, control of large cellular communication networks, real-time graphics, weather and resource modeling, highly parallel communications with peripheral devices, video conferencing, telepresence, and 3D display. Optical interconnects can ameliorate the inherent interconnect limitations of electronics for these emerging digital parallel systems. This paper will review the status of optical interconnects.