Optical Interconnects for Silicon Chip Stacks

Exchanging data at high speed over sufficiently long distances becomes a bottleneck in high performance electronic processing systems. Opto-electronic devices have now been developed to a point that they can enable high speed and high-density free-space optical interconnections at the MCM level between multi-chip sets. In the following, we discuss packaging issues and some research directions for the insertion of free-space optical interconnects in electronic processors.