Full C - Band Tunable Transmitter Optical Interconnect System Integration for Ultra - Short - Reach Applications On - Chip Optical Interconnects Silicon Photonics Indium Phosphide - Based Optoelectronic Wavelength Conversion for High - Speed Optical Networks

Optical networking technologies have been over the last two decades reshaping the entire telecom infrastructure networks around the world. As network bandwidth requirements increase, optical communication and networking technologies have been moving from their telecom origin into the enterprise. For example, today in data centers, all storage area networking is based on fiber interconnects with speeds ranging form 1 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s. As the transmission bandwidth requirements increase and the costs of the emerging optical technologies become more economical, the adoption and acceptance of these optical interconnects within enterprise networks will increase. This paper, which provides the framework for the different optical interconnect technologies in this special optical issue of the Intel Technology Journal, is organized as follows. First, a brief overview of the fiber optics interconnects technology evolution and its current application within the enterprise, is presented. Second, various interconnect evolution paths, such as, board-to-board, chip-to-chip, and on-chip interconnects, are discussed.