In this article, ETU-Link will explain to you what causes the high temperature of the optical module and how to solve it. Generally speaking, a brand-new optical module will not have any major problems during short-term use.

The optical module is a relatively sensitive optical device. When the operating temperature of the optical module is too high, it will cause problems such as excessive transmit optical power, received signal error, packet loss, etc., and even burn the optical module directly in severe cases.

If the temperature of the optical module is too high, the indicator of the corresponding port will be set to red. At this time, we can see a string of numbers—0x00000001, which means that the temperature of the optical module is too high.

The corresponding solution is to replace the optical module. After the optical module is replaced, we need to wait for 5 minutes (the polling cycle of the optical module is 5 minutes, and the fault recovery of the optical module is generally required to observe the status after 5 minutes.). After that, we should observe the status of the port alarm light and whether the alarm status is restored.

After the new optical module is replaced, the red light on the port goes out, which means that the optical module fault alarm has returned to normal. According to the operating temperature, optical modules can be divided into commercial grade (0℃-70℃), extended grade (-20℃-85℃) and industrial grade (-40℃-85℃), among which commercial grade optical modules are the most widely used. But in fact, different application environments need to select the optical module of the corresponding temperature level, otherwise it is easy to cause the temperature of the optical module to be abnormal, which affects normal use.

Commercial-grade optical modules are suitable for indoor enterprise computer rooms and data center computer rooms, while industrial-grade optical modules are suitable for industrial Ethernet and 5G fronthaul. Moreover, the safety and reliability requirements are high.

In the 5G bearer optical module white paper, it is mentioned that the 5G fronthaul AAU side optical module involves outdoor applications. The outdoor temperature is changeable and the working environment is relatively harsh.Therefore,industrial-grade optical modules with superior performance are required.

The above is the solution that ETU-LINK has compiled for you to solve the high temperature of the optical module. When we choose and use the optical module, we need to clarify the use scene, select the working temperature range of the optical module, and also need to control the ambient temperature of the optical transceiver.