Who are Newnex and what do you do?
Newnex is a company located in California, in the United States. We mainly focus on connectivity solutions for machine vision, pro audio visual, and medical imaging. Half of our business is for cables, passive cables and connectors, and the other half is for extension solutions such as active repeater cables, extenders and hubs. For the extenders, for example, this year we have the optical repeaters that utilize the optical fiber to extend the USB 3.1 Gen 2 signal up to 300 meters and it supports either USB 3.1 Gen 2 10 gigabytes per second bandwidth, or it can support two 5G devices simultaneously, depending on the application. On the other hand, we also have the active copper repeater cables that use the copper cable as a transfer media. With an active circuitry it can the USB 3.1 Gen 1 signal up to 16 meters.
What are the differences between the active copper cable and the optical fiber and what can they be used for?
The most important difference is the distance. The optical fiber solution is designed for a long-distance extension, up to 300 meters for USB 3.1 10G transfer in our case. Also, the fiber can be made EMI free, so for some industrial environments people may prefer a fiber solution over a copper solution.
On the other hand, the copper is more cost effective since it's cheap and easy to manage. It is mostly for shorter distance connection because a passive USB 3.0 cable normally only goes up to five meters. If your application is between five meters and 16 meters, a little bit longer than standard length, this one would be an ideal solution for you.
What are the applications that you can use it for?
Right now for machine vision, most people either use USB3 vision cameras, or GigE Vision cameras. Basically any USB3 camera will work with our cables. Within the machine vision industry the USB3 cameras are widely used.
What type of customers do you have that are currently using your products?
A lot of the system level integrators, they buy the machine vision cameras from the camera manufacturers and design a specific system that work for specific jobs. For example, they design a inspection system with multiple cameras, or there's a product line for automatic packaging systems, so they will incorporate our devices into their system. That's one of our typical user scenarios.
What benefits does a wired solution provide over a wireless solution?
First of all, a wired solution is cheaper. With wireless solutions, it's hard to cost down and shrink the size. The implementation cost is really high for a wireless solution, so that's why you don't see any USB3 wireless solutions out there on the market. In addition wireless connection is easier subject to noise interferences. Therefore people still need cables as the interconnection media for most of their hardware solutions.
How are you looking to develop your products?
We are very dedicated to USB technology development. Currently, most people are still using USB3.1 Gen 1, AKA USB3.0, but this technology has already gone to the next generation, the USB3.1 Gen 2, or USB3.2, and a high data version of Thunderbolt is also coming too. We follow the technology trend closely and contribute to the USB standard development. We constantly provide innovative solutions to serving needs for new interfaces.