Optical interfaces

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 447.

Integrated circuits

Future technologies

Equipment which implements the SDH standards will be strongly influenced by the capabilities and cost of the enabling technologies. This section reviews the impact on both equipment, and the stand­ards themselves, of some of these developments.

The unrelenting trend to faster, smaller and cheaper traffic handling ICs (ASICs), obviously leads to cheaper network element hardware. This, in turn, will eventually lead to the introduction of SDH equipment onto the premises of business customers. The trend to higher functional integration will probably lead to changes in PTO premises design because of increased heat dissipation in a given volume of rack space.

Very low cost SDH optical interfaces are expected to produce the long awaited shift in PTO station cabling from coaxial copper to optical fibres. There are several advantages to optical interconnec­tion e.g. relatively long range, no crosstalk, physically small calling volume. However, perhaps the biggest advantage is the future proof­ing which results from the fact that an optical interconnect cable can, within reasonable limits, carry any hit rate. Besides enabling the reuse of cables that would be difficult to reuse otherwise, it also reduces the problem of successive layers of interconnect cables physically preventing the withdrawal of the older, disused, cables that they are burying.