What are Fiber Optic Transceivers Used for

Fiber optic transceiver is also called fiber optic transmitter and receiver. It is composed by optoelectronic devices, the functional circuit and the optical interface. the optoelectronic device includes a transmitter and receiver.
Fiber Optic Transmitters: LEDs, fabry-perot (FP) lasers, distributed feedback (DFB) lasers and vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are the 4 types of source for the transmitters that can convert the electrical signals into optical signals. They are al tiny semiconductor chips. Fiber Optic Receivers: The receivers use semiconductor detectors (photodiodes or photodetectors) to convert optical signals to electrical signals. Silicon photodiodes are used for short wavelength links (650 for POF and 850 for glass MM fiber). Long wavelength systems usually use InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide) detectors as they have lower noise than germanium which allows for more sensitive receivers. Very high speed systems sometimes use avalanche photodiodes (APDs) that are biased at high voltage to create gain in the photodiode.
The role of fiber optic transceiver can be simply concluded: Fiber transceiver is a photoelectric conversion device that converting electrical signal into an optical signal at the transmission side, after the transmission on the fiber optics, the optical signals are transmitted into electrical signals at the receiving side.
In the traditional network, the network cables or coaxial cables are usually used, but their communication bandwidth and signal quality they provide can no longer meet the growing need of
customers. While the era of fiber optic network makes the optical switches, SDH equipment, fiber converters, fiber optic multiplexers, and more related fiber optic equipment developed rapidly. In the works process of these fiber optic network equipments, the fiber optic transceiver modules are needed to convert the electrical signals via the laser driver to optical ones, and then transmit the optical signals trough the optical fibers for a long distance, when the signals arrive at the receiving end, it then be converted into an electrical signals through the fiber optic receiver ((Pin-Tia or APD).
The following list the regular equipments that the fiber transceivers may used for:
Fiber Optic Multiplexer: Common fiber optic multiplexers use 1 x 9 package fiber optic module, some HD multiplexers would use SFP optical modules.
Fiber Optic Converters: 1 x 9 transceiver modules.
Fiber optic network card: 1 x 9, SFP or SFP+ optical modules.
Fiber-optic high-speed ball machine: SFP optical module
The base station: XFP, SFP optical module.
The above is the analysis of several devices using the optical modules. It can be seen that 1 x 9 and SFP optical modules are the most commonly used, the difference between them is that:
1 * 9 optical module are welded on the device, while SFP transceiver is hot-swappable.
There are uniform standards for the design and production of fiber optic transceivers. The case of the basic specifications, the optical modules from the major manufacturers such as Huawei, Cisco, Juniper, FiberStore, etc. In addition, the compatibility issues that we often talk about refers to the optical modules are compatible use for communications equipment of different manufacturers, for example, the optical module from FiberStore can be totally compatible with Cisco routers or switches. Because the fiber modules are written with the Cisco series switches compatible codes during the production to be work normally with Cisco equipments.

SFP Transceiver Specification

SFP Transceiver Definition
SFP is the shortened form of Small Form-factor Pluggable. SFP transceiver is a compact optic transciver widely used in optic communications for telecommunication and data communications, which is infact a pluggable version of SFF(Small Form-factor).
SFP transceiver is a popular indussrty format which is governed by multisource agreements (MSA) from several fiber optic component vendors like A Agilent, IBM, Lucent, Siemens, Infineon, AMP/Tyco, and others.
The main parts in a transceiver include a FP laser (or uncooled DFB laser), a PIN optical receiver with TIA built in, a post amplifier, a laser driver, and a microprocessor.

Applications of SFP Fiber Optic Transcevier

SFP fiber optic transceivers are used for both telecommunication and data communication. . And they support SDH/SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, etc. This device has 10 I/O connections at the rear of the package and interfaces a network device mother board such as a swith, router, media converter, etc. to a fiber optic or copper networking cable. SFP transceivers are widely used in networks like metro access network, metro core network, Wide Area Networks.

Types of SFP transciever

SFP transceivers are available with a variety of different transmitter and receiver types, allowing users to select the appropriate transceiver for each link to provide the required optical reach over the available optical fiber type including multi-mode fiber or single-mode fiber. Optical SFP modules are SFP transceivers are available with a variety of different transmitter and receiver types, allowing users to select the appropriate transceiver for each link to provide the required optical reach over the available optical fiber type (e.g. multi-mode fiber or single-mode fiber). SFP transceivers are available for 850 nm (SX), 1310 nm (LX), 1550 nm (ZX), and DWDM/CWDM. Few types are listed below:
1. 1000Base-SX
2. 1000Base-LX/LH
3. 1000Base-ZX
4. CWDM SFP transceiver
6. SFP+ 10G
7. 1000Base-EX
8. DWDM SFP transceiver
SFP+ transceiver is an improved version of SFP and is intended for higher data rates, lower cost, and improved thermal performance which can support 8.5Gbit/s and 10.52Gbit/s Fibre Channel, 10Gbit/s Ethernet (10GBase SR, LR, and LRM), SONET OC-192 (9.95Gbit/s), and G.709 “OTU-2″ (10.7 Gbit/s). SFP transceiver has a Digital Diagnostic Monitoring interface and can automatically control output power and extinction ratio over a wide temperature range to compensate for laser degradation.