1. Definitions and general information

The success of the Internet, with more than a billion users in 2000 (source: UCSB), and the rapid growth in microprocessor performance (table 1 ) are placing ever-greater demands on interconnections in electronic systems. The number of inputs/outputs correlated with information flow will eventually choke the bottleneck of electrical interconnection solutions. The success of multimedia applications, made possible by the increased performance of microprocessors, now requires the transmission of data rates in excess of 10 Gbit/s (gigabits per second) on local networks or within computers.