Highly complex digital information processing systems require large numbers of signal interconnects. These interconnects increasingly limit system performance. Optics offers the potential to relieve some of these limits, since it does not suffer from the same crosstalk, skew, pinout congestion, and communications energy constraints as electronics. To take advantage of these strengths, one must realize space- and energy-efficient combinations of electronic and optical components, To this end we have pursued the monolithic integration of GaAs-based field-effect transistor (FET) technology together with GaAs-based multiple quantum well (MQW) self-electro-optic effect devices (SEEDs). We denote this integration scheme as a FET-SEED. A typical layer cross section is shown in Fig. 1. In this paper, we review the status of this technology and overview some of the technology choices involved.