Passive Direct Attach Cables variants: breakthrough and 1:1 cables

         A data center is the perfect medium where DAT (Direct Attach Cables) with their fabrication technology, have proven their utility. That is because of huge bandwidth that can be handled in the various pre-terminated solutions for 25 Gbit/s, 50 Gbit/s  and 100 Gbit/s.

         Direct Attach Cables are ideal for high density, high speed I/O data center applications in the networking, telecom and data storage markets where maximum overall network efficiency and lower overall cost are desired.

         Utilizing the same port as an optical transceiver, the copper based DAC is a more cost effective solution for short run applications, up to 5 meters, than fiber since it does not require power for signal conversion from electrons to photons.

          Passive copper cable assembly uses twinax shielded cable with robust die cast connector interfaces for enhanced support of high frequency data rates, which means signals travel over parallel pairs of conductors.

          Also referred to as twinax, a direct-attach twinaxial cable is very similar to coaxial cable, except for one additional copper conductor core. Both twinax cores are protected by an insulator layer and another metallic conductor surrounding the core pair. Analogous to twisted-pair cables, both cores are twirled together to diminish interference effects from outside sources.

          Passive copper cable is effectively viewed as a transparent cable to the switch and requires little to no direct power to operate.

          DAT passive cables fall in two major categories: 1:1 cables and breakthrough cables.

          1:1 passive cables are constructed as the name intuitively says, with the same SFP+ type termination at both ends.

          For example, we could have: 10G Direct Attach Twinax Copper Cable (DAC), 10GBASE-CR, SFP+ to SFP+ connection, 10 meter length, 24 AWG, passive. We can have different variants of lengths for previous example:  1 , 3, 5, 7, 15 meter cables.

          Another example is  with the QSFP termination  - Direct Attach Cable with lengths starting from 0.5 meter to the 7 meter.

Some of the cables from our offer include:

Applications:

The most common applications used with DAC Direct Attach Cables are:

Ethernet
Fibre Channel
Infiniband

The breakthrough DAC cables

he move from 10G to 40G Ethernet will be a gradual one. It is very likely that one may deploy switches that have 40G Ethernet ports while the servers still have 10G Ethernet ports. For that situation, we should use a QSFP+ to 4 SFP+ direct attach breakout copper cable.

Breakout cables allow equipment with one QSFP+ port to connect directly with four 10Gbps SFP+ ports. Ideal for use with Servers, Switches and Adapters, these cables are terminated at one end with a QSFP+ connector, and  SFP+ connectors each end of the four breakout cables.Breakout cables are available in various lengths of up to 5 m for each individual cable.

100G Milestone 

100G QSFP28 TO 4X SFP28 BREAKOUT DAC

The 100G standard is covered with the following configuration. The hybrid passive copper cable is suitable for very short distances, which offers a highly cost-effective Ethernet connectivity solution for the interconnection between the devices using 100G QSFP28 ports and 25G SFP28 ports in data centers. Supported protocols: 100 Gigabit Ethernet LAN, 100G OTU4, 25 Gigabit Ethernet.