The 40 Gbps cascaded bit-interleaving PON

•A 3-level cascaded bit-interleaving (CBI) PON is introduced.•The ASIC implementation of a 40 Gbps CBI Repeater and CBI End-ONT is presented and discussed.•Comparison with a state-of-the-art optical network shows a 60% power reduction when replacing it with a CBI-PON.

In this paper, a 40 Gbps cascaded bit-interleaving passive optical network (CBI-PON) is proposed to achieve power reduction in the network. The massive number of devices in the access network makes that power consumption reduction in this part of the network has a major impact on the total network power consumption. Starting from the proven BiPON technology, an extension to this concept is proposed to introduce multiple levels of bit-interleaving. The paper discusses the CBI protocol in detail, as well as an ASIC implementation of the required custom CBI Repeater and End-ONT. From the measurements of this first 40 Gbps ASIC prototype, power consumption reduction estimates are presented.