Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Optical Interconnects

The articles in this special section focus on optical interconnects. These papers present the most recent developments in this field with extensiveness and depth, while ensuring the inclusion of the highest quality work. Large-scale data centers and high-performance computers (HPC) are becoming increasingly limited by the capacity of interconnects due to the rapidly increasing power consumption and bandwidth demands. As a result of the continuing bandwidth scaling, optical interconnects (OI) have been implemented at ever decreasing communication distances to replace electrical interconnects. Over the past decade, core switches and routers in data centers and HPC systems have adopted fiber optics to deliver the I/O performance between racks in multi-chassis configurations. Meanwhile, the further penetration of OI into shorter distances, such as the board and chip levels, poses new challenges on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for continued performance and cost scaling and further requires innovations in integration and packaging.