Now DAC and AOC cable are widely used, their wire material is different, but the function is the same. The customer will be confused how to choose since the function is the same. What are their advantages and disadvantages? At the customer’s request, let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages of DAC and AOC cable!
Active optical cable (AOC) is used for short-range multi-lane data communication and interconnect applications. Usually, the wire transmission of optical communication should belong to passive part, but AOC is an exception. AOC consist of multimode optical fiber, fiber optic transceivers, control chip and modules. It uses electrical-to-optical conversion on the cable ends to improve speed and distance performance of the cable without sacrificing compatibility with standard electrical interfaces. Since people expect more information to be available at their fingertips, our communications systems will need to be quicker, and AOC is one of the best solutions to solve this problem. Compared with direct attach copper cable for data transmission, AOC provides more advantages, such as lighter weight, high performance, low power consumption, low interconnection loss, EMI immunity and flexibility. At present, AOC is widely used in many fields as well as promoting the traditional data center to step into optical interconnection.
According to the wire material, can be divided into:
Direct Attach Cable, including active and passive DAC cable
Active Optical Cable（AOC）
DAC Advantages：
※ Higher data transmission rate: The DAC cable can support data transmission rates from 4Gbps to 10Gbps, is higher than traditional copper cable.
※ Strong interchangeability: With the development of copper technology, DAC cable and optical transceiver are interchangeable and hot swappable.
※ Low cost: Copper cable is cheaper than fiber, using DAC cable will reduce wiring cos.
※ Good heat dissipation: The DAC cable is made of copper core and has good heat dissipation effect.
DAC Disadvantages:
※ Short transmission distance, heavy weight, large volume, difficult to manage.
※ Susceptible to electromagnetic interference, such as adverse response and degradation etc.
AOC Advantages：
◆ Larger bandwidth: Device upgrades are not required, with throughputs up to 40Gbps.
◆ Lightweight: Much lighter than DAC cable.
◆ Low electromagnetic interference: because optical fiber is a dielectric, it is not easy to be affected by electromagnetic interference.
AOC Disadvantages:
Compared with DAC cable, the cost of AOC cable is higher.
Post time: Dec-20-2023
