Active Optical Cables and the truce between Optics and Copper

This week’s guest blogger is Jan Meise. Jan is responsible for Strategic Marketing at Finisar and his work in strategic marketing allows him to bring a very interesting perspective to some of the new trends in active optical cables. I’m hoping Jan will be a regular guest blogger on the site.
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Almost out of nowhere and with little time for everyone to digest, a new market segment emerged in mid-2007 in the optical component industry called Active Optical Cables (AOCs).

Put simply, an AOC has an electrical interface at both ends. The electrical to optical conversion is embedded into the cable wire harness and uses fiber optics cables as the transport medium.

And so new is the Active Optical Cable segment that analysts are still struggling to build a consensus forecast. While Lightcounting is estimating a 2010 AOC market of some $14m, IGI is two logarithmic steps more aggressive and sees potential for $1.1bn revenue in the same year.

Beyond revenue expectations, Active Optical Cables have the great potential to end the war between Optics and Copper. As Karen Liu of Ovum outlined in her article, there will be ‘universal ports’ for copper and optics allowing both to ‘help the total market’ as synergistic “frenemies”.

In this new post war era, systems are thereby using common host connectors enabling Data Center customers to deploy copper and/or active optical cables based on needed cable lengths and diameters, bend radii and of course, cost.

By moving the signal conditioning chips from the host board into the cable ends, electrical interfaces on the host board can be simplified, ultimately keeping the overall system cost and power need to a minimum.

Being able to choose among passive copper, active copper and active optical cables, end-users pay and consume power only according to their specific need.

While first concepts of Active Optical Cables were originally developed in the 1990s, the commercialization of those cables started in 2007 with products for InfiniBand, 10GbE, DVI and HDMI applications.

Finisar introduced its first two families of Active Optical Cables, Laserwire™ and Quadwire™ in 2007 and 2008, respectively. While currently mostly focused on 10GbE and InfiniBand, we have seen adjacent markets for those families all the way from industrial to consumer applications.

In subsequent posts I will take a closer look at those various markets but, in the meantime, you can check out the product briefs for Laserwire and Quadwire.

I invite your comments on Active Optical Cable technology, or even better, give me your best shot for the AOC 2010 revenue forecast! You can also follow me on Twitter.

I will be demonstrating Finisar’s cable products at Interop next week. If you would like to chat in person come by the Finisar booth #2612 anytime.