ACTIVE OPTICAL CABLE (AOC) EXPLAINED IN DETAILS !

WHAT IS A ACTIVE OPTICAL CABLE (AOC) ANYWAY?

Here is the brief definition of AOC:

Active Optical Cable (AOC) is a cabling technology that accepts same electrical inputs as a traditional copper cable, but uses optical fiber “between the connectors”. AOC 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.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s look at one AOC product. The following picture shows a 40Gb/s QSFP+ Active Optical Cable Assembly from FlyinFiber Company.

Take a even closer examination and we can see that the active optical cable (AOC) assembly is actually composed of 4 functional parts.

1. The “High-density QSFP+ connector”. This is the SFF-8436 electronic connector which can be plugged into a router or switch.

2. The “4-Channel full-duplex active optical cable transceiver”. This optical transceiver is embedded inside the shell so you cannot see it. This optical transceiver part is responsible for opto-electro (O-E) and electro-opto (E-O) conversion.

3. The MPO optical connector (the black part). This connector is permanently attached to the shell and fiber. This permanent attachment shields the optical interface from the end user and also from environmental contaminants.

4. The ribbon optical fiber cable (this picture shows a yello