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Market Report on Revenue Opportunities for Optical Interconnects

Jan 8 2014

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Revenue Opportunities for Optical Interconnects: Market and Technology Forecast - 2013 to 2020 Vol II: On-Chip and Chip-to-Chip" report to their offering.

The traditional architectural and material assumptions with regard to how integrated circuits are fabricated have been challenged in recent years and the semiconductor industry is looking for new solutions. Power and thermal issues add to this apparent crisis in the semiconductor industry.

The obvious solution is to deploy fiber optics; which is usually the way to go whenever and wherever there is a bandwidth problem. But fiber optic solutions to on-chip and chip-to-chip interconnection is something that will be hard to develop for commercial chip products. Producing photonic devices that are small enough and inexpensive enough to be used at the chip level is an immensely difficult requirement.

In this report, the author analyzes the latest developments in optical interconnection at the chip level and the progress in this area that is being made by important research teams throughout the world. Both R&D and commercial development are discussed.

The report looks at this issue from the perspective of classic CPU chips as well as the latest architectures, and the opportunities for optical interconnection are compared to a possible future for metal interconnects and interconnect alternatives that are even more exotic than photonics; carbon nanotubes, especially.

The report also contains a 10-year roadmap that explains where and when the commercial opportunities for optical interconnection at the chip level will emerge and how much they will be worth. We also profile the leading firms and research efforts involved in designing and implementing on-chip and chip-to-chip optical interconnection.

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