High-Speed Integrated Visible Light Communication System: Device Constraints and Design Considerations

Visible light communications (VLC) has the potential to play a major part in future smart home and next generation communication networks. There is significant ongoing work to increase the achievable data rates using VLC, to standardize it and integrate it within existing network infrastructures. The future of VLC systems depends on the ability to fabricate low cost transceiver components and to realize the promise of high data rates. This paper reports the design and fabrication of integrated transmitter and receiver components. The transmitter uses a two dimensional individually addressable array of micro light emitting diodes (μLEDs) and the receiver uses an integrated photodiode array fabricated in a CMOS technology. A preliminary result of a MIMO system implementation operating at a data rate of 1 Gbps is demonstrated. This paper also highlights the challenges in achieving highly parallel data communication along with the possible bottlenecks in integrated approaches.