A configurable transmitter architecture & organization for XG-PON OLT/ONU/ONT network elements

The XG-PON standard for Passive Optical Networks (PONs) imposed high performance requirements for network equipment. Especially, the 10G transmitter designs of the office equipment (OLT), the terminals and the network units (ONTs and ONUs) become quite demanding because of the real-time requirements for preparing a frame. The current paper introduces a three layer architecture, scalable with respect to the bandwidth and suitable to realize the transmitter of the XG-PON OLT/ONT/ONU elements. The architecture's upper layer decides what data packets will be transmitted. The second layer's microsequencer commands the lowest layer's modules, which produce and locally store all the data packets to be transmitted. The three layer approach allows the architecture to be configured and organized as either an OLT transmitter or an ONU/ONT transmitter; and to be scalable and perform the functions of the OLT at 10 Gbps and those of an ONU/ONT at 2.5 Gbps. The implementation of a XG-PON ONU transmitter on Xilinx Virtex7 verifies the approach.