Integrated Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) Transceiver

Main Researcher: Diedrik Vermeulen

Current broadband services such as copper-based access technologies, i.e., the asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) and cable modem (CM), have reached there limits and the growing demand for bandwidth is driving the deployment of optical networks. Without a doubt, Fiber-To-The-Home is the most impressive technology for realizing very high symmetrical bandwidths. Due to the rising demand, optical fibers become cheaper every year and many advances have made optical fiber networks much less costly than they once were. Still, the use of discrete optical components for fabricating FTTH transceivers makes these devices not suitable for mass production. The key to solve this problem is integrating the optical functionalities on a single chip. Through integration of FTTH transceivers it is possible to significantly reduce the installation costs of FTTH optical networks. Furthermore the maintenance cost and power consumption will decrease. It is believed that integrated optical equipment will stimulate in the near future the deployment of FTTH networks.

Figure 1: Schematic overview of an integrated FTTH transceiver.

Point-to-point Fiber-to-the-Home optical access networks require large volume and low-cost optical transceivers, both at the subscriber and the central office side. From the perspective of the transceiver at the subscriber side, 1310nm is the upstream channel and 1490nm and 1550nm are the downstream channels for data and CATV. In Figure 1, an integrated FTTH transceiver is schematic illustrated. Starting from the fiber, we can distinguish five functionalities:
1. Interface between the fiber and the optical chip
2. Splitting of the downstream and upstream channels
3. Splitting of the downstream wavelengths (CATV and data)
4. Detection of the downstream wavelengths
5. Transmission of the upstream wavelength

Other people involved:

• Jonathan Schrauwen
• William Chen
• Diedrik Vermeulen

PhD thesises