Automotive is the fastest growing market sector for fiber optic connectors.     The market for fiber optic connectors, after years of promising predictions, is finally (really) taking off. From plastic optical fiber (POF) used in automobile communications systems to embedded optics in high-performance computing (HPC), fiber-optic connector use is growing. The largest revenue opportunitiesRead More

From its inception, silicon/CMOS photonics was supposed to revolutionize optical communications, but has yet to come to fruition. How much progress has been made so far?   Both Intel and Luxtera have been working on silicon/CMOS photonics for more than 13 years. While we have a few products, its promise of lower-cost, lower-power-consumption optical devicesRead More

Demand for higher data rates, panel density, and practical channel lengths with acceptable signal integrity have put pressure on copper connectivity to deliver the most practical solution. Embedded optical transceiver technology emerges to address this need.   Copper circuits still rule the high-speed electronic world, but optical alternatives continue to chip away at that dominance in nicheRead More

As patient records, diagnostic information, and even the operating theater increasingly rely on networked electronics, the amount of data that must be managed has grown dramatically. Here we’ve excerpted a detailed white paper by Berk-Tek Leviton Technologies on some of the available solutions for increasing speed and efficiency in a facility’s cabling infrastructure.   Hospitals and otherRead More

The rapid growth of cloud computing requires data centers to scale up, but traditional copper presents limitations in distance, bandwidth, and efficiency.   The business of today’s data-driven world is being conducted in the Cloud. The rapid growth of cloud computing requires data centers to dramatically scale up in order to handle the oceans ofRead More

Fiber optics are poised to enable network functionality like never before with increased data rates and bandwidth inside the data center.   The need to change the data center network from a hierarchal one to a leaf-spine or more meshed one has arisen from the ever-increasing need for compute and storage access and the useRead More

Cloud computing and bandwidth-intensive applications have made the data center more important than ever, and managers want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of its architecture, even down to the connector level.   In today’s environment, data centers are gaining importance due to the trend of outsourcing access to data (through the Cloud) while continuously supporting bandwidth-intensive applicationsRead More

As system speeds increase to multi-gigabit levels and beyond, ensuring signal integrity in high-speed channels requires major backplane connector performance upgrades.   Backplane architecture has served the electronics industry well for many years. Circuitry embedded in up to 40 layers of the backplane can create custom point-to-point, broad parallel bus structures or full mesh networks, essentiallyRead More

Choosing between fiber optics and copper? According to Jacques Mieville of Fischer Connectors, the further you go, the more you need fiber.   When properly maintained, there is no argument that fiber has significantly greater bandwidth and is more reliable than copper. Because fiber transmits data as a series of light pulses instead of electricalRead More

Fiber optics has long been touted as the next big thing. After 30 years of expectation, is that reality finally here? Fiber optics has long been defined as a technology that will become mainstream within five years…for at least the last 30 years. That may finally be changing. We don’t see fiber replacing copper toRead More

Over the last three decades, a myriad of optical connectors have come and gone, but small form factor connectors are making the choice easier these days. Molex offers tips on how to specify small form factor optical connectors.    In a maturing market, there are clear winners that prove superior and push out competing technologies.Read More

The annual Optical Fiber Communications Conference continues to grow, and ProLab’s Giacomo Losio reports on the top five technologies that everyone was talking about.   OFC 2015 was a very busy show. Sometimes you go to a two-day event and think it could have been condensed into one, but in OFC’s case it could have been three andRead More