LC Duplex Fiber Connector for High-density Cabling

Due to its small size, LC connector is the mainstream fiber optic connectors, and is widely used in optical communication networks, data networks and cable television networks. In daily application environment, LC duplex connector used more often because of its cabling space saving. LC duplex fiber optic connector is two simplex LC connectors encased in a common housing. Compared with LC simplex connector, the installation steps are reduced, saving time and money.

HYC’s LC duplex connector is superior to traditional LC duplex connector, providing an innovative solution for quick unlocking. Compared to the traditional two single connectors, this duplex connector only needs one press to achieve double releasing.

Fig 1. LC Duplex Connector

As shown in Figure 2,3, the design of this two-core connector has two advantages, one is the longer clip and another is lower clip. The extended longer latch on top of the connector body makes it easier to disengage from the adapter, even in high-density packaging. If you have the experience of releasing LC duplex connectors in patch panels in high-density cabling, you may know why this is important. Because in the cabling case, thumbs and forefingers are not ideally suited to operate the release lever and pulling the connector. The handle portion of a conventional duplex connector will be slightly higher than the adapter, which will take up more space during the cabling installation. The lower clip design of this LC duplex connector can save more space.  In the high-density environment of the data center, the space saved by multiple connectors is combined to have a great advantage.

Fig 2. Longer clip

Fig 3. Lower clip

Another important advantage is the ability to reverse polarity. In the optical signal transmission, the optical signal is divided into a receiving end and a transmitting end. The optical fiber link transmitting signal (Tx) at one end of the optical cable must be matched with the corresponding receiver (Rx) at the other end, and the matching is called polarity.

Fig 4. Polarity

Conventional LC fiber jumpers have significant limitations in achieving polarity switching. It is necessary to pay special attention to the direction of polarity transformation to avoid the failure of termination, and face the possibility of replacing the jumpers and re-cabling. The ability to switch polarity of this LC duplex connector makes this operation easier, saving a lot of time and wiring costs by easily switching polarity without any tools.

Fig 5. Reverse polarity

With the rapid application of 5G, how to provide a high-density, low-cost, easy-to-manage, and highly reliable network cabling system for data centers has become an increasingly important requirement. The LC duplex fiber optic connectoris a high-reliability, low-cost, high-density cabling solution.

High-density Fiber Optic Enclosure

Fiber optic enclosure is an integrated unit for fiber management. They are designed to house, organize, manage and protect fiber optic cables, and are ideal for high-density fiber applications in data centers, central offices.

Figure 1 : HYC fiber optic enclosure

Fiber enclosure comes in various configurations, such as rack mount, wall mount, indoor or outdoor. Rack mount enclosures are the most commonly used fiber-optic enclosures for the telecommunications industry. Rack mounts are usually 19 inches and come in units of 1U, 2U, 3U, or 4U.

Types of HYC rack mount fiber enclosure:

Figure 2 : Types of rack mount fiber enclosure

U is short for rack unit and 1U equals 1.75 inches. HYC Patch Panel Enclosures are available in 1U, 2U, and 4U heights and may be configured to offer dozens of high performance networking solutions. 1U enclosure has 4 cassettes; 2U for 12 cassettes; 4U for 24 cassettes, respectively.

Figure 3 : Specification of ODF

A single module box has 24 channels, which is suit for 3x8F/ 2x12F/1x24F LC connection. 1U rack mount fiber optic enclosure allows for 6 fiber cassettes, holding up to 144 fiber capacity for LC interface; while 2U has 12 fiber cassettes holding up to 288 fiber cables; 4U fiber enclosure has 24 fiber cassettes holding up to 576 fiber cables. A large variety of adapter are offered to meet specific requirements such as LC, MPO, etc.

Fiber enclosure rack mount is a very popular one for rack cabling solution in cabinet. Each HYC rack mount patch panel is engineered to provide superior cable management for any fiber network.

How to Choose High Quality Fiber Optic Adapter?

Optical fiber adapter is the connecting parts in the middle of optical fiber connectors. The fiber optic adapter can precisely connect the two end faces of the fiber so that the optical energy output from the transmitting fiber can be coupled to the receiving fiber. It is designed to join and align the connectors of two fiber optic patch cables.

With the widespread use of fiber optic adapters in fiber optic connections, there are a variety of optical fiber adapter to choose, to adapt to different environment installation requirements.  Common types of adapters are: LC adapter, FC adapter, SC adapter, ST adapter, E2000 adapter, MTP / MPO adapter.

With a number of different adapters available, how to pick the high quality fiber optic adapter may become a problem. In general, the following points should be considered when considering fiber optic adapters.

Flame retardant level of the adapter

UL 94, the Standard for Safety of Flammability of Plastic Materials for Parts in Devices and Appliances testing, is a plastics flammability standard released by Underwriters Laboratories of the United States. The standard determines the material’s tendency to either extinguish or spread the flame once the specimen has been ignited.

HB,V0, V1 and V2 are different flame retardant grades. Different grades has different fire resistance test methods and different test criteria. Flame retardant grades are gradually increased from HB, V-2 and V-1 to V-0. There is less optical fiber adapters on the market that can reach the UL94-V0 level. HYC’s LC Dual/Quad adapters complies with the UL94-V0 standard.

Insertion loss

Usually, insertion loss is required to be less than 0.2dB. If the insertion loss is too high, it will affect the transmission of light.

Repeatability

The adapter needs to be plugged and unplugged frequently, so the durability of the adapter is important. The normal standard needs to ensure that the number of plugging and unplugging can reach more than 500 times without affecting the insertion loss.

Operating temperature

-40℃ ~ 75℃ is a normal working range of the adapter. The operating temperature of this HYC LC adapter is -40℃~85℃.

Materials for adapter alignment sleeve

The alignment sleeve is the most important component of the fiber adapter, which is generally made of metal or ceramic.The fiber adapter made of ceramic will have a relatively good effect. Because the crystal structure of ceramic is hard and not easy to be deformed, it can achieve fast alignment and high-precision optical fiber end face connection.

Generally speaking, the above five points should be taken into account, when considering a fiber optic adapter. There are still some other factors affecting the quality, such as tensile strength and compliance standards,etc. Fiber optic adapters are widely used in communication equipment rooms, FTTH fiber-to-the-home, local area networks, fiber-optic communication systems, fiber-optic connection transmission equipment,defense operations equipment, and so on. Although the fiber optic adapters are small, its quality directly affects the entire fiber link. It should be rigorous and comprehensive while choosing the fiber optic adapters.

Article from HYC Blog

Athermal AWG Module

In the construction of large-capacity main transmission network, DWDM (Light Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing System) has become the main body of long-distance trunk transmission network due to its advantages of large capacity, support for multiple services, and good scalability. Part of the rack plan in the DWDM system construction is no power supply(such as WDM-PON, etc.). AWG (Athermal Arrayed Waveguide Grating) is a new type of pure passive device that is designed to match this requirement.

Development of DWDM technology at home and abroad mainly have three kinds, respectively based on array Waveguide Grating (AWG – Arrayed Waveguide Grating) and medium membrane filter (TFF) and fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) technology.AWG is a planar waveguide device. The AWG is a planar waveguide device and is an arrayed waveguide grating fabricated on a chip substrate by using PLC technology.Compared with FBG and TTF, AWG has the advantages of high integration, large number of channels, low insertion loss, and easy mass production.

The AWG uses a temperature-controlled circuit and a heater to keep the AWG chip in a constant temperature environment of about 70 °C, which keeps the wavelength of each channel of the AWG stable. The major advantages of an athermal AWG are that there is no need for power supply or temperature monitoring of the AWG device. As a pure passive product, it can use self-compensation technology to do self-adaptation control for external temperature. Its center wavelength is insensitive to the change of ambient temperature. It can be widely used in the metropolitan area and long-distance DWDM optical fiber communication system.

HYC’s athermal AWG module is based on arrayed waveguide grating technology, which does not require power and temperature generation equipment; it belongs to pure passive module. With low insertion loss ，PDL, and low crosstalk, it has good stability in the operating temperature range of -40°C to 85°C.  HYC provides a series of AAWG DWDM MUX/DEMUX with 32, 40 and 48 channels optional, available in standalone 19-inch rack mount and small metal box. What’s more, these modules can also have power monitoring terminal port and other band expansion port. All the product is Telcordia GR-1209 & GR-1221 qualified, and RoHS compliant.

With the rapid development of 5G, users will have higher and higher bandwidth requirements. To meet the need of communication capacity, the bit rate of optical fiber communication is improving all the time. The active WDM-PON solution is difficult to be deployed on a large scale due to high cost; and the passive WDM-PON has more application space because of its low cost, no power supply, and easy installation. The athermal AWG will be more widely used with a larger number of channels, denser channel spacing, and no need to rely on power supply or temperature control.

Article from HYC Blog.