What Is a Small Form-Factor Pluggable Transceiver?

A small form-factor pluggable transceiver (SFP) is a small, hot-swappable optical transceiver for optical communications applications in telecommunications and data communications. The SFP connects the motherboard of the network equipment such as switches, routers, etc. to the optical fiber or UTP cable. SFP is an industrial specification supported by some fiber optic component providers.

SFP transceiver support

SFP transceivers have a variety of different transmit and receive types, and users can choose the appropriate transceiver for each link to provide

SFP transceivers are specified by a multilateral agreement (MSA) between competing vendors. SFP based

At present, most optical SFP transceivers support SFF-8472 (Industrial Standard Multilateral Protocol). According to the SFF-8472 protocol, digital diagnostic monitoring (DDM) must be supported. This feature enables end users to detect SFP in real time. Parameters, such as the five basic monitoring parameters: output optical power, input optical power, temperature, laser bias current, voltage. ^[1]

The SFP MSA defines a 256-byte memory map in the EEPROM. The standard interface, manufacturer, and other information can be accessed at the 8-bit address 10100000X (A0h) through the I²C interface. ^[1]