TE introduces active optical cable assemblies

TE Connectivity's second-generation Paralight QSFP+ active optical cable assemblies are suitable for applications such as high-speed interconnects within switches and transport equipment.

The cable assemblies are designed to offer customers significant power and cost savings through fully integrated optical engines that use less power.

When compared with the previous-generation assemblies, they are lower in cost and offer higher performance, according to the company.

Designed with internally terminated optics, the new product line eliminates the need to clean an optical connector.

The cables feature a passively cooled, environmentally friendly design that offers a low thermal resistance path from the chip to the connector shell for additional operational savings.

An added benefit of the second generation of Paralight QSFP+ active optical cables is improved cable management though the lightweight design, small diameter of 3.0mm and tight bend radius.

This second generation of cables includes four transmit and four receive channels at 10Gbps per channel for Infiniband-standard SDR, DDR and QDR applications.

With 850nm VCSEL technology, the cable assemblies operate over a data rate of 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps per lane with an aggregate data rate of 40Gbps.

The cables incorporate electrical-optical and optical-electrical conversion that is built into the connector shell to yield an improvement in PCB real-estate utilisation.

The cable assemblies are available in lengths up to 100m using 50-micron fibre, and longer lengths are available upon request.

The EOE circuitry is designed for use with 8B/10B encoded data streams such as Infiniband, Fibre Channel and XAUI.

The QSFP connector style supports connections for an I2C-serial interface, which can be used to identify the product and performance capabilities.

Applications include high-speed interconnects within and between switches and transport equipment, server-server clusters, super-computing interconnection and rack-to-rack, shelf-to-shelf, board-to-board and board-to-optical backplane interconnections.

The active optical cables meet the differential I/O per Inifiniband version 1.2.1 specification.

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