A WDM ACCESS SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE BASED ON SPECTRAL SLICING OF AN AMPLIFIED LED AND DELAY-LINE MULTIPLEXING AND ENCODING OF 8 WAVELENGTH CHANNELS FOR 64 SUBSCRIBERS

We propose and demonstrate a novel spectrum-sliced and delay-line mult iplexed multiple-wavelength source and its use in a WDM access system, In the proposed system, the pulsed output from an amplified LED is sp ectrally sliced by a WDM router and multiplexed with short fiber delay lines into individually addressable wavelength channels that can be m odulated with an external modulator. By using an Er-fiber amplified 1. 55-mu m LED as the source, eight-channel WDM routers, an 8 x 8 star co upler, and monolithically integrated amplifier-modulator chips for dat a encoding, our experiment demonstrated that a single LED can provide down-stream WDM links to 64 subscribers each at 50 Mb/s.