Demonstration of High-Power Budget TDM-PON System With 50 Gb/s PAM4 and Saturated SOA

Increasing mobile traffic and smart devices require continuous expansion of optical access network capacity and easy optical connectivity for residential, business, and mobile services. A high-speed TDM-PON system with high power budget is an attractive solution to accommodate explosive mobile traffic since multiple remote nodes with simple optical power splitters could easily provide optical connections anywhere in an optical distributed network. Thus, both high speed per wavelength and high-power budget are desirable in the TDM-PON system. We demonstrate a TDM-PON system with 50 Gb/s/λ with PAM4 and 35-dB power budget in the entire O-band by simply operating a booster SOA in the saturation region. In addition, a dynamic range of 50 Gb/s PAM4 receiver higher than 15 dB is demonstrated to support loud-soft ratio. We also successfully demonstrate error-free transmission of 50 Gb/s TDM-PON system by utilizing an OLT line-card and an ONU board.