Development of High Density Fiber Optic Connectors

The COBO Alliance held a webinar at 8:00 am Beijing time this morning, and invited two fiber optic connector experts to talk about the development of fiber optic connectors for high density and COBO requirements.

     The first expert was Yip from Shenzhen Optec. He talked about optical backplane fiber shuffle technology. He believes that shuffle is the best interconnection solution for hundreds of fiber optic connectors in the CPO system. This factory-prefabricated and tested connection system saves space and cost.

     Teruhiko Omori from the optical device department of Fujikura Corporation, Japan, who appeared second, talked about the high-density miniaturized connector of the 51.2Tbps CPO system. One of his solutions is the MDC MMC connector jointly developed with US Conec and other companies, and the other is an 80-micron cladding fiber optic connector. The switch switching capacity ranges from 640G to 51.2T, the SerDes speed ranges from 10G to 112G, and the switch port density is getting higher and higher. In order to accommodate enough ports in a 1RU panel, a new type of connector is necessary. The new MMC16 supports more than 4000 connections in 1RU, and MMC24 can support more than 6000 connections. MMC is a mini multi connector, fully compatible with MPO.

     If you want to further increase the port density, Fujikura also proposes an 80-micron clad fiber connector, which uses the same mt ferrule as the 125-micron, with a 250-micron pitch, which is especially suitable for cooperating with silicon optical systems.

More flexible, larger capacity, higher density, and compatible with the previous generation of products, today’s two lectures give us a little more perceptual understanding of the future evolution of optical connectors.