Essence Information About Active Optical Cable You Should Know

by infiberoneoptic optic John M. Smyth's Homemakers

To meet the needs for the higher bandwidth, more optical components are soaring. While most people prefer to choose one with low cost and higher performance from the perspective of long-term development. Therefore, active optical cable (AOC) comes into sight. And it’s expected that it’s in great demands and in a good prospect. Now, this article will have a further exploration for it.

AOC is a kind of direct attached cable (DAC), available in 10G, 40G and even 120G, and usually used for short-range multi-lane data communication and interconnection applications. Generally speaking, the wire transmission of optical communication should belong to passive parts, but AOC is an exception. It’s made up of multimode optic fibers, optical transceivers, control chip and modules. By converting the electric to the optic on the cable ends, it improves speed and transmission performance of the cable without damaging the compatibility with standard electrical interfaces.

To some degree, it’s due to its unique design and structure that brings it many advantages in many aspects.

In cost, compared with the optical transceiver, AOC is the more cost-effective solution for the data center.

Firstly, the optical transceivers terminated to the cable are cheaper than the optical transceivers due to that there are no lasers in the terminated transceivers (the lasers in the optical transceivers are very expensive).

In addition, the AOC eliminates the separable interface between transceiver module and fiber cable. That’s to say, the transceivers are permanently attached to the fiber cables and no patch cables are needed. While the optical transceivers need to be applied together with patch cords which may be expensive.

Furthermore, because there are no air holes between the optical transceivers and optic fibre cables, AOC can provide protection from environmental pollutants and other troubles during its installation.

In weight and performance, Compared with direct attach copper cable for data transmission, AOC is lighter and with higher performance.

It is known that DAC is heavy, bulky and requires significantly higher power, making it difficult to physically manage the data center. Besides, the nature of electrical signals, electromagnetic interference (EMI) also limits DAC’s performance and reliability. However, AOC provides lighter weight, smaller size, EMI immunity, lower interconnection loss, and also reduces the power requirements.

With so many benefits, AOC assembles are naturally applied in various applications, such as optical backplanes, rack-to-rack, shelf-to-shelf interconnection, storage, hubs, switches, routers, servers, etc. The detailed introduction is below:

l Infiniband QDR, DDR and SDR interconnections

l Data Aggregation, Backplane and Proprietary Density Applications

l PCI-Express, SAS/SATA, Fiber Channel compatible interconnect

l 40GBE and 10GBE interconnections

l 10G/40G Telecom connections

l Hubs, switches, routers, servers

l 10G/40GEthernet

l Data Centers

l High Performance Computing Clusters

All in all, as the rising star in the telecommunication industry, AOC apparently is the best solution for high-performance computing and storage applications. Fortunately, Gigalight provides the AOC products, such as 10G SFP+ AOC, 40G QSFP+ AOC, 120G CXP AOC and so on. If you want to know more information about it, welcome to contact us.

Note: Gigalight is the head office of Infiberone.