A 6-m OOK VLC Link Using CMOS-Compatible p-n Photodiode and Red LED

Abstract

This letter presents an on – off -keying visible-light-communication (VLC) link realized over 6-m distance. The transmitter is implemented with a commercially available red LED source at 650 nm. While most of the reported high-performance VLC links are using p-insulator-n photodetectors, this receiver employs a simple CMOS-compatible p-n photo-detector. A 150-Mb/s optical wireless transmission is measured with a bit-error rate of $1.3\times 10^{{\mathbf {-6}}}$ , which falls below the forward error correction limit of $3.8\times 10^{{\mathbf {-3}}}$ . The second-order L-C-R equalization is used in both the transmitter and the receiver circuits to achieve maximum bandwidth extension. The VLC link is realized with a low illuminance of 250 lux. This power is below the common indoor illumination levels which enables advanced lighting-compatible VLC applications. The receiver and the source circuits consume around 240 and 105 mW, respectively, which represents to our knowledge a record energy-per-bit level of 2.3 nJ/b.