This book is a product of an emerging interdisciplinary field that is using photonic
communications to address many of the challenges associated with scaling computing system performance. With the emergence of multicore architectures and the
ever-growing quest for parallelism, system performance is increasingly bound by
its communication rather than computation capabilities. Data movement in the
optical domain offers many unique advantages and the possibility of new interconnection network architectures that can enable future computing performance
gains. The underlying photonic technologies also present many unique design
challenges. It is our goal in this book to bridge the gap among these interdisciplinary fields and create a common reference for evolving the design and development of chip-scale photonic networks.