Guest Editors' Introduction: Silicon Nanophotonics for Future Multicore Architectures

The articles in this special section discuss the applications and services provided by silison nanophotonics for multicore network architectures. The need for high-performance and energy-efficient communication between processing cores has never been more critical. The increase in core counts in emerging chip multiprocessors (CMPs) has put more pressure on the communication fabric to support many more streams of high bandwidth data transfers than ever before. An important consequence of this trend is that chip power and performance are now beginning to be dominated not by processor cores but by the components that facilitate transport of data between processors and to memory.