Burst-mode clock and data recovery with FEC and fast phase acquisition for burst-error correction in GPONs

We demonstrate experimentally for the first time the impact of forward error correction (FEC) on the performance of 622/1244 Mb/s burst-mode clock and data recovery (BM-CDR) with instantaneous phase acquisition (0 bit) for any phase step ( +/- 2 pi rads) for gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) optical line terminator (OLT) applications with (255, 239) ReedSolomon (R-S) codes. Our design is based on commercially available SONET CDRs operated in 2 x over sampling mode. This burst-mode receiver (BM-RX) provides a similar to 5 dB coding gain at bit error ratio (BER) of 10(-10). We also show that this novel technique of employing FEC on BM-CDRs with fast phase acquisition time, provides a solution for fast burst-error correction giving reliable and predictable BERs in bursty-channels. The BM-RX meets the GPON physical media dependent layer specifications defined in the ITU-T 6.984.2 recommendation. The coding gain can be used to increase the optical link budget as specified in the ITU-T G.984.3 standard, that is, support higher bit rates, achieve longer physical reach between the OLT and the optical network units (ONUS), as well as increase the number of splits per single PON tree.