Electrical and optical links continue to provide challenges that cannot be overcome by process technology advances alone. The ingenuity of the designer is a major contribution, and this is clearly demonstrated by the papers in this session. The first is an invited paper that reviews state-ofthe-art optical interconnects in scalable, high-density standards-based switching fabrics for networking systems and cloud computing. The second paper describes the first electrical domain solution to the non-linear dispersion for both transient and adiabatic chirp of directly modulated lasers. This is followed by a paper that describes the first optical burst-mode receiver with rapid power on/off functionality for a data-rate of 56Gb/s and a power efficiency of 2.2pJ/b in always-on mode.
