In most generations of high-performance systems, optics seem to take over at first, but the cost advantage of their electrical counterparts wins in the end. System manufacturers historically have been reluctant to replace incumbent electrical interconnects with optical solutions, due to their lower complexity and lower-cost supply chain, unless the lack of a viable electrical solution has made it necessary. Each offers specific tradeoffs based on density, reach, reliability, cost, and power in a given application. Optical and electrical interconnect technologies have always competed to be the solution of choice.

Limitations in the interconnect throughput, density, and latency pose a major bottleneck to the system performance, hindering further advances for future architectures. Interconnect technology is essential in enabling these new parallel architectures to achieve their targeted performance. This file type includes high resolution graphics and schematics when applicable. Multicore parallel architectures have been employed to keep up with the demand. Over the past 10 years, though, improvements in transistor performance have slowed down with marginal power improvements from one process node to another, limiting the integration density. While the performance and bandwidth of these systems have almost doubled over the past two decades, most if not all of such improvements in the first decade were due to higher transistor speeds and greater integration of CMOS technology. High-throughput network switches and high-performance computing systems have maintained their exponential growth for the past 20 years and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

Optical isolator in electrical network