Abstract:A simple and scalable wavelength division multiplexing/time division multiple access passive optical network (WDM/ TDMA-PON) system is demonstrated that uses spectral slicing and forward error correction (FEC) with a Reed-Solomon (255, 239) encoder in burst mode upstream transmissions. Receiver sensitivities are improved to −33.5, −34.9 and −35.5 dBm at a sliced bandwidth of 100, 200 and 400 GHz with FEC. Moreover, the dispersion penalties after a 20 km transmission are only about 0.6 and 0.4 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 10 −10 at 200 and 400 GHz, respectively.