A WDM access system architecture based on spectral slicing of an amplified LED and delay-line multiplexing and encoding of eight wavelength channels for 64 subscribers

We propose and demonstrate a novel spectrum-sliced and delay-line multiplexed multiple-wavelength source and its use in a WDM access system. In the proposed system, the pulsed output from an amplified LED is spectrally sliced by a WDM router and multiplexed with short fiber delay lines into individually addressable wavelength channels that can be modulated with an external modulator. By using an Er-fiber amplified 1.55-μm LED as the source, eight-channel WDM routers, an 8×8 star coupler, and monolithically integrated amplifier-modulator chips for data encoding, our experiment demonstrated that a single LED can provide down-stream WDM links to 64 subscribers each at 50 Mb/s.