Do You Know about Active Optical Cable (AOC)?

Bandwidth usage is soaring, driven by the proliferation of Internet-connected devices. At this time, active optical cable (AOC) has emerged. Besides, the market of AOCs keeps growing and has a broad prospect. What’s active optical cables? Why should we use it? In this article, some knowledge of active optical cables will be provided.
Introduction to Active Optical Cable (AOC)
Active optical cable (AOC) is used for short-range multi-lane data communication and interconnect applications. Usually, the wire transmission of optical communication should belong to passive part, but AOC is an exception. AOC consist of multimode optical fiber, fiber optic transceivers, control chip and modules. It uses electrical-to-optical conversion on the cable ends to improve speed and distance performance of the cable without sacrificing compatibility with standard electrical interfaces. Since people expect more information to be available at their fingertips, our communications systems will need to be quicker, and AOC is one of the best solutions to solve this problem. Compared with direct attach copper cable for data transmission, AOC provides more advantages, such as lighter weight, high performance, low power consumption, low interconnection loss, EMI immunity and flexibility. At present, AOC is widely used in many fields as well as promoting the traditional data center to step into optical interconnection.
Differences Between Passive/Active Copper and Active Fiber
Passive cabling provides a direct electrical connection between corresponding cable ends. Active cables provide the same effect but, by embedding optics and/or electronics within the connectors, can overcome some of the limitations of passive cables. While passive cables are always copper-based, active cables can use either copper wire or fiber optics to provide the link between the cable ends. The picture below shows us the leading types of passive and active cables for data center.
Why Use Active Optical Cable (AOC)?
Primarily, active optical cable (AOC) assemblies were invented to replace copper technology in data centers and high performance computing (HPC) applications. As we know, copper passive twinax cable is heavy and bulky, making it difficult to physically manage the datacenter. And due to the nature of electrical signals, electromagnetic interference (EMI) limits copper’s performance and reliability. Though there are so many disadvantages of copper cable, at that time, it is the main stream while the idea of AOCs almost seems too good to be true. However, the advantages of AOC make the predecessors look obsolete and unsophisticated, and changes the limitation of copper passive twinax cable as well as playing an important role in high speed data transmission. Nowadays, a variety of AOCs have been launched in the market, such as 10G SFP+ AOCs, 40G QSFP+ to QSFP+ AOCs, 40G QSFP+ to 4 SFP+ breakout AOCs and ,40G QSFP+ to 8xLC breakout AOCs.
Conclusion
Fiberstore‘s AOCs achieve high data rates over long reaches which are the best solutions for high-performance computing and storage applications. We provide many AOC products such as 10G SFP+ AOCs, 40G QSFP+ AOCs, QSFP+ to 4 SFP+ AOCs, and QSFP+ to 8 x LC AOCs. In addition, customized active optical cables are available in various lengths, Cisco compatible and other options. For more detailed information, please visit http://www.fs.com or contact us over sales@fs.com.

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