Abstract: With the development of semiconductor technology, the chip integration is increasingly improved, and more and more computing cores can be integrated in a single chip. The efficiency of data moving between computing cores im- pacts the performance of whole chip. Optical interconnect using wavelength division multiplex technology has high transmission speed but low signal loss, low transmission delay and power consumption. It will become the potential technology to solve the on-chip communication problem of future multi core and many-core processors. To meet the needs of future on-chip communications, the features and limitations of electrical interconnect were analyzed. Then, the statcof-thcart and the future trends of optical interconnect technology were studied, and its limitation was presented. Based on these works,the features,advantages and drawbacks of some typical on-chip optical interconnection architec- ture were analyzed deeply. Finally, five important open problems were proposed.

Key words: On-chip optical interconnect, Silicon photonics, Interconnect network architecture