Guest Editorial on the Special Issue of Optical Interconnects

The papers in this special section are devoted to the topic of optical interconnections. These papers represent both the best of the conference as well as the leading edge technologies and research of the field. The performance scaling of digital systems demands for better interconnects with larger bandwidth, higher density, longer reach and lower power consumption. While it is becoming extremely challenging for electrical interconnects to meet such scaling demands due to limits of electrical channels, particularly crosstalk, loss, and power dissipation and delay for conventional impairment mitigation strategies, optics keeps penetrating deeper into the interconnect hierarchy of digital systems. In addition to performance attributes, photonic interconnects need to continue to reduce material, assembly and integration costs, especially as the number of interconnects grows with penetration into the system.