High-Density (HD) Active Optical Cables (AOCs) are an iPass connector and cable assembly solution capable of delivering 48 Gbps data rates over four lanes of 12 Gbps with reaches of up to 100 meters. The cables complement existing copper iPass+ HD connector and cable offerings and are designed to provide large-scale enterprise and data center storage system customers with a complete end-to-end solution. They feature a small 3.00 mm cable outer diameter, decreasing cable management and routing challenges by reducing bulk cable size and increasing flexibility. The smaller size also provides additional board space for system designers to implement more I/O ports. The system enables four 4x ports on low-profile PCIe cards, doubling the port density while providing easier routing through the cable management system. They also offer a low power consumption of 0.9 W per cable for improved overall data-center power consumption and thermal efficiency.  The cables are compliant with SAS-3 (12 Gbps) systems with optical-mode capability, InfiniBand (10 Gbps), Ethernet (10 Gbps) and are backward compatible with 6 Gbps SAS-2.1 optical-mode capable systems.