A System Design Perspective on Optical Interconnection Technology

Demands for increased interconnection density and higher bandwidth, coupled with constraints on the cost of advanced wide-bandwidth telecommunication switching and high-throughput computer architectures, are exhausting the capabilities of conventional electrical interconnection. Advances in integrated circuit technologies and enhanced digital services have created a “bottleneck” at the circuit-board-to-circuit-board level of the interconnection hierarchy. To alleviate this problem, AT&T is developing new techniques in parallel optical interconnection. Inserting parallel optical interconnection technology into advanced electronic processing systems not only meets projected performance requirements, but also potentially offers them at a competitive cost. This paper describes how future high-performance parallel optical interconnect technology might be packaged and used.