Recent advances in optical technologies for data centers: a review

Modern data centers increasingly rely on interconnects for delivering critical communications connectivity among numerous servers, memory, and computation resources. Data center interconnects turned to optical communications almost a decade ago, and the recent acceleration in data center requirements is expected to further drive photonic interconnect technologies deeper into the systems architecture. This review paper analyzes optical technologies that will enable next-generation data center optical interconnects. Recent progress addressing the challenges of terabit/s links and networks at the laser, modulator, photodiode, and switch levels is reported and summarized.