Delaire USA’s 8800 family of fibre-optic qualification test systems are designed to help verify the ability of high-speed optical network equipment to operate at the limits of cables defined by the 802.3 Ethernet standard. The latest addition to the product family allow full-duplex physical layer tests of 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet equipment.
In the 8800 test link equipment, each channel is composed of a pair of fibre-optic links, one transmit and one receive. This bidirectional test link architecture supports simultaneous multi-channel testing of both transmit and receive physical layer functions of a device such as router, switch or server, while operating under worst-case fibre bandwidth conditions. The 8800 can be used to test performance (e.g. bit error rate) and/or functionality (e.g. link configuration) of a single device’s transmitter and receiver or to test the interoperability of two devices under worst-case fibre bandwidth conditions.
Jeff Lapak, associate director at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory said, “The Delaire USA bidirectional fibre-optic test link lets us easily connect devices together over a worst-case cable plant in order to verify interoperability under stressful optical conditions. Having all four channels under stress at the same time allows for rapid and robust interoperability testing on devices like routers, switches, and transceivers.”
The 8800 supports both multimode and singlemode fibre applications. It is fully configurable to meet custom requirements where the customer defines the operational parameters of the system and can therefore be used to test other standards such as OTN, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel.
As an example, the IEEE 802.3ba specification defines a maximum operating distance of 150m for 40GBASE-SR4 over OM4 fibre with an effective modal bandwidth (EMB) of 4700MHz/km (at 850nm). To enable this requirement to be tested, the full-duplex 8800 contains four bidirectional channels (eight links) of identical fibre cut to the same length (spooled to within an accuracy of +/- 0.06 per cent) terminated with MTP/MPO connectors. The actual length of each link is selected to provide the worst-case link bandwidth specified in the standard.