In the world of data centers and high-speed computing, distance and time are killers. The distance between memory and CPU actually matters. The distance and communication speed between different nodes in a data center can be bottlenecks. That is why optical interconnects are worthwhile, even though their cost is likely to give an accountant heart failure.
That expense comes from the fact that their light sources, even light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with the components required to imprint information on the light (called modulators), are expensive. Many of you will be thinking “Chris, you’ve finally lost your last marbles, LEDs are cheap as chips.” And you are right, especially when it comes to organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).
The issue is that OLEDs cannot be directly modulated at high speed. Indeed, up until now, the fastest reported data transfer rate via a modulated OLED was a paltry 51.6Mb/s. Compared to even my own home network, this is simply too slow to be worthwhile. But, all that is now ready to change, as OLEDs capable of modulating data at more than 1Gb/s have been demonstrated.
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Source: Ars Technica – OLED-power link jumps from useless 50Mb/s to useful 1Gb/s