Optical Interconnects
Optical interconnects represent a transformative technology that addresses the fundamental limitations of electrical signaling at high data rates and over longer distances. As electronic systems push beyond multi-gigabit speeds, electrical interconnects face increasingly severe challenges from signal attenuation, dispersion, electromagnetic interference, and power consumption. Optical interconnects overcome many of these limitations by using photons rather than electrons to carry information, enabling dramatically higher bandwidths, longer reach, lower latency, and improved power efficiency.
Integrating optical technologies into electronic systems demands a working command of both the optical and electrical domains. From the physics of light generation and detection to the circuits that drive lasers and modulators and that process photodetector outputs, optical interconnects bridge two distinct physical regimes. This intersection creates design challenges in modulation formats, clock and data recovery, power management, and thermal design. It also yields compelling advantages for data center networking, high-performance computing, and the artificial-intelligence accelerator fabrics that increasingly measure efficiency in picojoules per bit rather than gigabits per second alone. The topics below trace this progression, from converting between electrical and optical signals to integrating photonics in silicon and packaging optics alongside the processors they serve.