Guest Editorial: Special Section on Optical Interconnects

Increasing delay of interconnects over devices at advanced nodes indicates a need for drastic change for interconnect. Such drastic changes have traditionally been possible through material changes. However, an alternative change in design may be near. In particular, on-chip optical interconnections are on the verge of being introduced to be able to cope with system-scale performance roadmaps. Thereby, photon-based information transfer may take the place of charge-based transfer that has been utilized within and across semiconductor chips for decades. Such a change would trigger significant updates to the design flows and circuitry.