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Transceiver is a term that was used in electronic radio communications defining a unit which contains both a receiver and a transmitter. From the beginning days of radio, the receiver and transmitter were separate units and remained so until around 1920. On a mobile telephone, the entire unit is a transceiver, for both audio and radio.
The Ethernet era usage:
Transceivers are called Medium Attachment Units (MAUs) in IEEE 802.3 documents and were widely used in 10BASE2 and 10BASE5 Ethernet networks. Fiber-optic gigabit, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 40 Gigabit Ethernet, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet utilize transceivers known as GBIC, SFP, SFP+, QSFP, XFP, XAUI, CXP, and CFP. SFP transceivers (small form-factor pluggable) are modules act to connect the electrical circuitry of the module with the optical or copper network, widely used for both telecommunication and data communications applications. The SFP transceiver is not standardized by any official standards body, but rather is specified by a multi-source agreement (MSA) between competing manufacturers. It is a popular industry format jointly developed and supported by many network component vendors.
Advantages:
An SFP interface on a network device (for example a switch, router, media converter, network interface card or similar device) provides the device with a modular interface that the user can easily adapt to various fiber optic or copper networking standards. However, as a practical matter, some networking equipment manufacturers engage in vendor lock-in practices whereby they deliberately break compatibility with "generic" SFPs by adding a check in the devices firmware that will enable only the vendors own modules. Third-party SFP manufacturers have introduced SFPs with "blank" programmable EEPROMs which may be reprogrammed to match any vendor.
Properties:
Modern optical SFP transceivers support standard digital diagnostics monitoring (DDM) functions. This feature is also known as digital optical monitoring (DOM). Modules with this capability enable the end user to monitor parameters of the SFP, such as optical output power, optical input power, temperature, laser bias current, and transceiver supply voltage, in real time.
Protocols:
SFP interfaces a network device motherboard (for a switch, router, media converter or similar device) to a fiber optic or copper networking cable. SFP transceivers support communications standards including SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel and other communications standards. They also allow the transport of fast Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet LAN packets over time-division-multiplexing-based WANs, as well as the transmission of E1/T1 streams over packet-switched networks.
Categories by optical reach, data rates and form factor:
|
FORM FACTOR |
DATA RATES |
DISTANCE |
WAVELENGTH/MEDIUM |
PROTOCOL |
|
GBIC – Gigabit Interface Converter |
1 to 2.5 Gbps |
GBIC-T 100m on copper,GBIC SX less than 2km,GBIC LX 10-20km,GBIC ZX 80km |
|
FE/GE GBIC,Fiber Channel GBIC, Video 1×9,CWDM 1×9,BIDI GBIC,CWDM GBIC,DWDM GBIC
|
|
SX - 850 nm, for a maximum of 550 m at 1.25 Gbit/s (gigabit Ethernet) or 150m at 4.25 Gbit/s (Fibre Channel |
SX - 850 nm, for a maximum of 550 m at 1.25 Gbit/s (gigabit Ethernet) or 150m at 4.25 Gbit/s (Fibre Channel |
850 nm To 1550 nm |
gigabit Ethernet |
|
|
SFP + |
10Gbps data rates up to 16 Gbit/s. |
Few examples: LX - 1310 nm, for distances up to 10 km (originally, LX just covered 5 km and LX10 for 10 km followed later) |
Singlemode |
|
|
XENPACK |
10GbE |
vary from 100 metres (330 ft) to 80 kilometres (50 mi) for fiber and up to 15 metres (49 ft) on CX4 cable legacy multi - mode fibres at distances of up to 300 metres (980 ft) |
CX4 cable
|
10 Gigabit Ethernet
|
|
QSFP |
4 x 1 Gbit/s QSFP |
0.5 m – 10 km |
Singlemode |
Gigabit Ethernet, 4GFC (FiberChannel), or DDR InfiniBand |
|
QSFP+ |
4 x 10 Gbit/s QSFP+ |
0.5–300 m |
multimode |
10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10GFC FiberChannel, or QDR InfiniBand |
|
QSFP28 |
4 x 28 Gbit/s QSFP+ |
0.5–300 m |
|
100 Gigabit Ethernet, EDR InfiniBand or 32G Fibre Channel. |
