Low-cost WDM-PON with colorless bidirectional transceivers

This paper presents a low-cost bidirectional (BiDi) wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) employing colorless uncooled BiDi transceivers (TRxs) and superluminescent diode (SLD)-based broadband light sources (BLSs). The C band is allocated for upstream and the E+ band for downstream in consideration of BiDi packaging, SLD development, and wavelength alignment of dual-window arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs). The BiDi TRx integrates an uncooled Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD), a p-i-n photodiode (PD), and a 45/spl deg/-angled thin-film filter in a small-form-factor (SFF) package. The SLD-based BLSs provide 13-dBm amplified spontaneous emissions (ASEs) with spectral ripples of < 3 dB and polarization dependencies of <1 dB. Colorless operations over 32 100-GHz-spaced channels are demonstrated from -20 to 80/spl deg/C in 155-Mb/s BiDi transmissions over 25 km.