Optical interconnects to silicon

This paper gives a brief historical summary of the development of the field of optical interconnects to silicon integrated circuits. It starts from roots in early optical switching phenomena, proceeds through novel semiconductor and quantum well optical and optoelectronic physics and devices, first proposals for optical interconnects, and optical computing and photonic switching demonstrators, to hybrid integrations of optoelectronic and silicon circuits that may solve basic scaling and other problems for interconnections in future information processing and switching machines.