First 50G-PON merchant silicon spurs operator trials

Broadcom has unveiled the industry’s first merchant silicon for the 50-gigabit passive optical network (50G-PON) access standard. Until now, only access equipment players such as Huawei and ZTE had their own 50G-PON silicon.  

A 50G-PON network. Source: Adtran.

Broadcom has announced two 50G-PON devices: an optical line terminal (OLT) chip and the optical networking unit (ONU) 50-PON port to the users.  Both chips include custom hardware from Broadcom to run artificial intelligence (AI) machine-learning algorithms. 

Jim Muth, senior manager of product marketing at Broadcom, says supporting AI benefits the operator and the quality of the end user’s broadband service. 

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