Burst-mode clock and data recovery with FEC for passive optical networks

Optical multiaccess networks, and more specifically passive optical networks (PONS) are considered to be one of the most promising technologies for deploying fiber-to-the-building/home/curb (FTTx). PONs are expected to solve the problem of limited bandwidth, the so called "first and last mile problem", that remains the bottleneck between the backbone network and high-speed local area networks (LANs). PONs provide a low-cost solution and a guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to enable new multimedia services. In a PON, multiple users share the fiber infrastructure in a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) network topology. This is in contrast to current access technologies, including DSL, VDSL, and cable, which use a point-to-point (P2P) network topology. The P2MP nature of networks introduces optical path delays which inherently cause the data packets to undergo amplitude, phase, and frequency variations - burst, mode trafic. This consequently creates new challenges for the design of optical receivers.; Optical receivers, and in particular, burst-mode receiver front-ends (BM-RXs) and burst-mode clock and data recovery circuits (BM-CDRs), must adapt to burst-mode traffic, where data bursts originate from various sources and travel different distances. The amplitude and phase of successive packets may therefore vary anywhere between 0--20 dB and --pi to +pi rads. The research objective of this thesis is to design, test, and enhance performance requirements of BM-CDRs for PONs.; We design and experimentally demonstrate a 622/1244 Mb/s BM-CDR with forward error correction (FEC) using Reed-Solomon (R-S(255, 239)) codes for Gigabit PONs (GPONs). We measure a coding gain of approximately 5 dB at bit error ratio (BER) of 10-10. The coding gain obtained verifies the claim of the increased link budget specified by ITU-T G.984.3 standard.; We also develop a novel technique for fast burst-error correction for bursty channels. This is achieved by employing FEC on BM-CDRs with fast phase acquisition time. We demonstrate this with our custom built bit error rate tester/analyzer (BBERT/A).; Finally, we develop a small-signal modeling technique for characterizing photodiodes. This technique is based on the measurement of S 11 parameters. We demonstrate our idea with a 10 GHz 1310/1550 nm InGaAs/InP PIN photodiode.