Fiber Optic Transceivers

With the development of technology, a fiber optic transceiver, which is a device used for the transition of electricity and light in fiber optical communication, is designed to carry data along the fiber optic cables. The transceiver is made up of three modules, and the most important one includes a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter takes an electrical input and converts it to an optical output from a laser or LED. The receiver captures the light signal from the transmitter, then converts it to the electricity signal. The transceiver combines the functions of both transmitter and receiver. According to different capacity needs, there are different connectors of fiber optic transceivers, and the most commonly used ones are SFP, SFP+, XFP and QSFP fiber optic transceivers.

SFP+ Fiber Optic Transceiver

The SFP+ transceiver is the acronym of Small Form Factor Pluggable Plus, is a kind of fiber optic transceiver to achieve the conversion of light and electricity signals. SFP+ transceiver is an upgraded version of the SFP that can transmit a faster speed up to 10 Gbps. It has the same appearance and connector as the SFP, but it can provide a higher speed than SFP. In general, when a SFP can support over 8Gbps, it can be called as SFP+.

SFP Fiber Optic Transceiver

SFP is the abbreviation of Small Form Factor Pluggable, which is hot-pluggable used for the conversion of light and electricity signals. SFP is a mini version of GBIC, and it has all the functions of GBIC, for example it can transmit over one gigabit signals. Because its small size, it is easier for people to carry and install. And with the appearance of SFP transceiver, people step into a smaller-sized era of fiber optic transceiver. The SFP fiber optic transceiver interfaces a network device motherboard (for a switch, router, media converter or similar device) to a fiber optic networking cable.

QSFP Fiber Optic Transceiver

Nowadays, people are not satisfied with 10G bandwidth in network communication, therefore QSFP, (Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable) a device which can support data transmission rate up to 40Gbps, is designed to replace SFP whose transmission rate is at most 10Gbps. QSFP is a fiber optic transceiver with four channels used for transmitting and receiving light of electricity signals. It is more efficient and has a higher density than SFP which only has one channel. QSFP interfaces networking hardware to a fiber optic cable or active or passive electric copper connection.

CWDM SFP

CWDM SFP (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing Small Form Factor Pluggable) is a type of single-mode transceiver which combines the CWDM technology and is used for Gigabit Ethernet and fiber channel (FC) in campus, data center, and metropolitan area access network. It is composed of three parts: an uncooled laser transmitter, a PIN photodiode integrated with a trans-impedance preamplifier and a MCU control unit. Generally, CWDM SFPs come in eighteen wavelengths that range from 1270nm to 1610nm distinguished by different colors. CWDM SFP can support the high performance of 1.25Gbps data rate and 80km distance of signal transmission. There are several commonly used types of CWDM SFP transceivers including CWDM SFP 1470, CWDM SFP 1490, CWDM SFP 1510, CWDM SFP 1510, CWDM SFP 1530, CWDM SFP 1550, CWDM SFP 1570, CWDM SFP 1590.

DWDM SFP

DWDM SFP is the abbreviation of Dense Wavelength Division Small Form Factor Pluggable. It is a hot-pluggable transceiver used as part of a DWDM optic network to provide high-capacity bandwidth across a fiber optic network, and it can gather different wavelength together onto one single fiber. DWDM SFP is a high performance, cost effective module for serial optical data communication applications which can reach the speed up to 40Gbps on one optic fiber nowadays.

SFP28

SFP28 is a kind of SFP, which is used to provide conversion of electricity and light signals both in telecommunication and data communication. It is a 25Gbps interface which evolves from 100 Gigabit Ethernet, and it is typically implemented with 4×25Gbps data lanes. SFP28 is able to provide higher speed of data transmission than SFP. It functions with both optical and copper interconnects.

QSFP28

QSFP28 is a compact, hot-pluggable transceiver which is widely used for the transmission and reception of light and electricity data in fiber communication. 28 stands for the highest possible rate of 4x28Gbps in transmission. Generally, QSFP28 is an enhanced version of QSFP, it is used on 100G Ethernet while QSFP is used on 40G Ethernet. QSFP28 is usually applied in high-speed interconnects within and between switches, routers and transport equipment.

Active Optical Cable

Active optical cable (AOC) is employed in short-range multi-lane data communication and interconnect applications. Actually, the wire transmission of optical communication should belong to the passive part, but AOC is an except one. AOC is made up of multimode optical fiber, fiber optic transceivers, control chip and modules. It used electrical-to-optical conversion on the end of cable to enhance speed and distance performance of the cable without sacrificing compatibility with standard electrical interfaces. As people want more information at hand, the communication system is expected to be quicker. And AOC is one of the best solutions to handle this problem. AOC has a wider bandwidth which can reach up to 40Gbps with QSFP+. AOC is widely used in many fields and promotes the traditional data center to step into optical interconnection, with its lighter weight, higher performance, low power consumption, low interconnection loss.

Directive Attach Cable

Directive Attach Cable (DAC) is a type of cable linking the integrated duplex data transceiver for bi-directional communication. DAC is designed for 10Gigabit Ethernet, and it can be divided into active and passive ones. The active DAC can provide electronics and optics within connectors, transmission through fiber, while passive DAC can only provide direct connection between cable ends, transmission through copper wire.