January 10, 2005 Chicago, IL -- Stratos Lightwave LLC has a new family of bulkhead media converters (BMCs) for harsh environment applications. Housed completely within an industry standard bulkhead connector, these media converters accept a standard optical signal such as Fast Ethernet, and convert it to an industry-standard signal such as IEEE802.3u (100Base-T). These devices handle both the optical-to-electrical and the full physical layer (PHY) conversion.
The BMC decrease the engineer's overall design burden by removing all "inside-the-box" fiber management. BMC units are designed to greatly simplify the incorporation of an optical interface into systems and equipment for military, aerospace, outdoor digital video, petrochemical, marine, or any harsh environment application that would benefit from a fiber-optic interface.
Inside the box, any circuit board or subsystem equipped with Cat5/RJ-45 modular jack cabling is plugged directly into the backshell of the BMC unit. On the outside, an Expanded Beam fiber optic cable is plugged into the front. The units are virtually plug-and-play. In addition, the integrated bulkhead design eliminates virtually all packaging issues, resulting in a compact, highly reliable optical interface suitable for the harshest environments.
This ease of design-in opens the door to obtaining the benefits of fiber optics for systems and applications thought to be too rugged for fiber optics, or for engineers unfamiliar with designing the fiber interface themselves. Fiber-optic benefits include greater bandwidth over longer distances, decreased susceptibility to EMI/RFI noise ingress, and an increased level of security due to the difficulty of "eavesdropping" on the optical signal.
The Stratos BMC family consists of a number of standard options, including Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet media conversion using the standard RJ-45 interface connection. Other variations include Ethernet MII or GMII ribbon cable interfaces, and 1x/2x Fibre Channel transceivers with a ribbon cable interface on the electrical side.
All products feature Stratos's Expanded Beam optics for a reliable, easy-to-clean, easy-to-mate optical interface designed to resist water, mud, dust, oil, and high levels of shock and vibration. Maximum optical link distance is 2 km (1.2 mi) for Fast Ethernet, and 550 m (1800 ft) for Gigabit Ethernet. BMC units are available for either 62.5/125- or 50/125-micron multimode fiber, and can be equipped with one to four optical channels, in various combinations of simplex and duplex configurations. Operation is via a single +3.3-V power source.
The all-metal bulkhead housing provides a watertight barrier to IP67 and MIL standards. These units have an operating temperature range of -40 degrees C to +85 degrees C, and meet MIL-STD-810E for shock and vibration. Immersion rating is 2 hours at 1 m (MIL-STD-810E).
Pricing for the new BMC varies according to the desired protocol, analog interface, number of optical channels, and the quantity purchased.