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Optical interconnects are being considered as a possible solution to the well known problems of scaling in VLSI interconnects. Along with enabling higher speed interconnects, optics allows the construction of highly connected and irregular networks that are streamlined for particular applications. Using these networks, it is possible to implement application mappings that allow flexible, single-hop communication patterns between processors. This has advantages for reduced system latency and power. Such optically connected multiprocessors are particularly promising for embedded digital signal processing (DSP) applications, which are highly parallel, and typically have tight constraints on latency and power consumption. This paper addresses novel trade-offs involving communication routing flexibility, power consumption, and performance that arise in the context of system synthesis of optically-interconnected multiprocessors. We report on experimental results that expose these trade-offs, and propose systematic techniques to address them efficiently. We demonstrate the performance of these techniques on several benchmark examples.