Demonstration of symmetrical 50-Gb/s TDM-PON in O-band supporting over 33-dB link budget with OLT-side amplification

Single wavelength 50 Gb/s passive optical network (PON) is an excellent candidate for meeting high capacity requirements. In this paper, we experimentally investigate a symmetrical 50 Gb/s time division multiplexed passive optical network (TDM-PON) system in the O-band based on 25G optics. Semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is used in optical line terminal (OLT) side to improve link power budget. We initially investigate the performances of SOA as a booster amplifier with different gain in the downstream and make a trade-off between receiver sensitivity and power budget. The performances of 50 Gb/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) in the downstream with avalanche photodiode (APD) receiver and upstream with SOA-PIN receiver with different equalization schemes are evaluated. Experimental results show that up to 34.97 dB link power budget is achieved in the downstream direction with 7-tap feed forward equalization (FFE), and 33.76 dB link power budget is achieved in the upstream direction with only 3-tap FFE filtering.