As the chips become more and more powerful, so their need to communicate becomes steadily greater and it is in this context that parallel optical connections have been identified by the industry as an "advanced interconnect technology" that requires urgent research and development.

The partners in CIOS are well placed to rise to this challenge, having developed a broad spectrum of techniques that can be brought together to tackle this task. As part of this process we have been building demonstrator systems that incorporate the electronic, optoelectronic and optical components needed to realise working systems.