Data center high speed interconnect product solution

With the rapid growth of Internet and smart terminals, the explosive growth of global data has greatly promoted the development of High Performance Computing Center (HPC) and data center market with high-speed routers, supercomputing and storage as the core. Active fiber optic cable products are one of the main interconnection methods among these core devices. The Research Report of active fiber optic cable market from CIR shows that the market scale reached 720 million US dollars in 2012, which is expected to double in 2017, reaching 1 billion 900 million US dollars, with a bright future.
With the 40G/100G port of the server, switches and other devices in the data center by the commercial scale, for high speed optical interconnection products is also increasing demand, the current domestic manufacturers research and development and innovation of integrated optical interconnection technology, high-speed parallel optical module and the high frequency signal integrity technology in-depth understanding and research. The key requirements of optical interconnect products are high rate, high density, low cost and low power consumption. At present, the market mainstream high-speed optical interconnect products include 10Gbps SFP+ AOC, 40Gbps QSFP+AOC, 56GQSFP+AOC and 120Gbps CXP AOC.
The following is the CIR report on the optical interconnect AOC market forecast.

Significant advantages and applications of high speed optical interconnect technology
The demand of data center / cloud computing system on higher bandwidth and lower power is more and more urgent. AOC active fiber optic cable is one of the best solutions to meet this demand. AOC active cable has many significant advantages compared with the copper interconnection, such as in the system on the link transmission power is lower, the weight is only 1/4 direct copper, copper volume slightly half, air flow cooling and has a better room cabling system, optical cable bending radius smaller than copper, farther the transmission distance (up to 100~300 meters), and the transmission performance of the error rate is better, BER can reach 10^-15. Compared with the optical transceiver module, the AOC active fiber optic cable has the advantages of no exposed optical interface, no cleaning and contamination of the optical interface, the stability and reliability of the system are greatly improved, and the maintenance cost of the computer room is reduced.
High speed optical interconnection products 40Gbps QSFP+ AOC and 120GbpsCXP AOC no longer adopt the structure design of TOSA/ROSA in traditional pluggable transceivers, while using highly integrated array light engine core device technology. The picture below is 40G QSFP+On PCBA, COB (Chip on Board) integration technology is used to realize the integration mode with small package, high speed, low power consumption (QSFP+ power consumption is lower than 1.5W, CXP power consumption is lower than 2.5W). In the transmitter, the array optical engine also handle a high-speed channel, and convert it into a multi-channel optical signal, the optical signal together, through a 12 core (24 core) MPO high density cable to transmit the information to the cloud computing system or data center room next node. At the receiving end, an array of optical engine converts the optical signal of MPO cable in the call signal will handle multiplex electrical signals transmitted to the device. These products are fully applicable Infiniband Internet application scenarios, at the same time with the Ethernet IEEE 802.3ba. in the data center and cloud computing systems, array optical engine technology has been widely used in active optical cable products: Internet servers and switches.But the optical engine technology is also facing great challenges, the core laser is monopolized by a small number of international manufacturers, the price is not expensive, and the laser drive and limiting amplifier chip welding technology also affects the manufacturing efficiency, restricting the domestic manufacturers to promote substantially. Based on these reasons, the integration of silicon photonic technology is the future development trend of optical interconnection in the whole optical engine integration on silicon platform, integrated all the necessary functions, to achieve a lower cost, simpler manufacturing process, the establishment of a high density optical transmission system.
In the data center computer room, the devices (servers, switches, and HBA) that provide various high-speed optical communication ports need to be connected together by cables to work together. So how to solve the interconnection of any two kinds of equipment? For example, 10GSFP+ and 40G QSFP+ devices. Active fiber optic cable QSFP+ to 4 SFP+AOC optical interconnection products become the best solution to achieve and solve the interconnection of QSFP+ and SFP+ devices.

QSFP+ 4*SFP+ high-speed active cable products, one end of the QSFP+ interface of 40Gbps, the other end is 4 10Gbps SFP+ interface, connected by high density MPO 12 core cable, and then according to the customer demand for both ends of the cable length, the MPO cable into the middle of a branch, a 40G optical signal into four 10G signal. One end of the fiber optic cable adopts 40G QSFP connector, which conforms to the requirements of SFF-8436; the other end adopts 4 way 10G SFP+ connector, which meets the requirements of SFF-8432. It is the most economical and simple switch port conversion. The length of the transmission is 1~100 meters, and the length of the fiber optic cable on both ends of the splitter can be freely selected. Similarly, 120G CXP to 3 40G QSFP+ interconnect products can solve the problem of CXP and QSFP equipment interconnection, need to put forward is the middle through the 24 core MPO high-density optical cable fan out of 3 4 core products, complete perfect transfer.
The following diagram is 40GQSFP to turn 4 10G SFP+ and 120G CXP into 3 40GQSFP+ optical interconnect products

Concluding remarks
The significant advantages of optical interconnect products make it a data center integrator, the focus of equipment vendors, large-scale deployment of optical interconnect products began to become the world's big data, large density, high-capacity data center and cloud computing common trend of development.