Abstract: Interconnect is the most dominant factor determining system performance in integrated circuit. As technology is scaled down, device size have been shrunk on chip, copper based electrical interconnects are facing many problems like dispersion, attenuation, ringing and reflections. New design challenges are continuously emerging, conventional interconnects are not able to fulfil design requirement. Electrical interconnects have high failure rate at connecting nodes such as processors, memories and input/output ports. Optical interconnect plays vital role in removing the bottlenecks of existing interconnects and offers no. of advantages such as increasing interconnect channels, integration and reconfigurability. In this line of thought this paper discusses limitations & drawbacks of electrical interconnect. The electrical and optical interconnect are compared based on different criteria. The simulation result of transient analysis shows that optical interconnect gives better result at global interconnect level.

Keywords: optical interconnect, copper interconnect.