FEATURE CELLULAR, WI-FI & IOT
Never home alone Optical fibre for the home network
Connectivity is growing stronger. Optical fibre reduces weight and operates at a higher bandwidth. Network interoperatability is becoming easier within a domestic setting. All are considered by Clive Saddler, business development director at KDPOF, who argues for the benefits of plastic optical fibre circuitry in a home network
E
ven though ISPs and telecom operators offer stronger internet access speeds, not all of them provide methods to deploy the speed within the home. Instead, the consumer is generally required to implement their own ad hoc home network. The advantages of a new wired network include high speeds and a dedicated medium as a backbone, immune to overcrowding. But what about the specifics, particularly its material?
WHY POF? When installing new wires, optical fibre has an advantage over copper cable. Firstly, with its thin cross section, it can be co-located in any duct with the main cabling, reducing clutter. If they need to surface mount the fibre along the skirting board or architrave, it will not be overly visible, unlike CAT6 or coax. Despite its benefits, optical networks in the home are unusual, so a media converter is required to connect to an Ethernet network. There are two types of optical fibre for home networking: glass optical fibre (GOF) and plastic optical fibre (POF). GOF offers a very large bandwidth, but is delicate and expensive to install. POF, conversely, is inexpensive, highly tolerant to bending and much easier to install.
20 JUNE 2019 | ELECTRONICS
With increased access speeds, the ideal home network solution is one that combines the advantages of a POF taking over from the 5Ghz backbone, with the ease of installation and ubiquity of Wi-Fi access points in the home. POF also enables the minimising of Wi-Fi overcrowding, by providing just enough power to cover a specific area. Mobile devices will perform better, therefore, with 1Gbps of POF backhaul speeds.
APPLYING IT TO THE ETHERNET In terms of a media converter’s construction, there is a simple hardware design to follow, interfacing the Ethernet side by SGMII or RGMII, and the POF side by a transceiver. The heart of the media converter is a fully integrated Gigabit POF Ethernet serial transceiver, optimised for low power, with a small footprint. These POF devices implement the physical layer of the ETSI TS 105 175- 1-2 to transmit data on standard SI-POF, MC-POF, or PCS.
Coverage and high bandwidth requirements become more essential for home connectivity, as demonstrated in this graph
KDPOF’S NETWORK SOLUTION KDPOF offers its own solution for POF networking, following the demands mentioned earlier: the KD1000. Manufactured using a 65nm CMOS low-power process, KD1000 devices incoporate digital communication technology, which uses the most advanced techniques in high-spectral, efficiently coded modulations, adaptive non-linear equalisation and finally, adaptive bitrate. The KD1000 family is designed to be used with current, off-the-shelf photonics, including RCLED, LED and PIN PD, currently used in 100Mbps products with an analogue optoelectronics interface. The built-in analogue interface simplifies connectivity to the fibre optic transceiver (FOT). The KD1000 devices support standard MII, RMII, RGMII, SGMII and 1000BASE-X interfaces, simplifying system and board level designs. These devices can be used as an Ethernet MAC or PHY. In addition, by using the SerDes interface, the POF port offers the same connectivity as an IEEE 802.3 100 BASE-X device (125Mbps with 4b/5b NRZI line code) or an IEEE 802.3 1000 BASE-X device (1.25Gbps with 8b/10b NRZ line code). Single-port KD1000 devices are available in 88- pin QFN or LGA packages, as well as in bare die, which reduces the size of the POF port by enabling the integration of KD1000 devices, with optoelectronics, in a single optical package.
KDPOF
www.kdpof.com / ELECTRONICS
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