Intel's and IBM have made some progress towards integration in the Processors optical circuits or components: receivers, transmitters, and even lasers. Last most difficult. The light source in a complex chip requires not only specific materials and production methods other than traditional CMOS-process, but also difficult to operate - the risk of overheating and so on. It is possible that at first spread in silicon photonics can get method when using an external laser.
So, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, MIT, and the Colorado in Nature published an article that talked about the creation of two SoC, coupled optical chains. To illuminate the on-chip optical transceivers - 850 pieces in each chip - an external laser. For communication between the chips all three optical channels: the reception, transmission and lights. Each chip also contains two core RISC-V and 1 MB of memory (total of 70 ml Transistors). During the experiment, one of the chips are used for a computing own core and "neighboring" memory. Speed Optical Channel was enough to make two chips work without downtime and errors.
Conducted experiment also revealed bottlenecks in the project. Care operating temperature by one degree Celsius immediately led to errors in communication channels. However, developers proved possible to produce with conventional equipment chips with optical communication channels.