1.3  GHz E-O bandwidth GaN-based micro-LED for multi-gigabit visible light communication

• Published in: Photonics research (Washington, DC) DC), 2021-05, Vol.9 (5), p.792
• Main Authors: Wang, Lei, Wei, Zixian, Chen, Chien-Ju, Wang, Lai, Fu, H. Y., Zhang, Li, Chen, Kai-Chia, Wu, Meng-Chyi, Dong, Yuhan, Hao, Zhibiao, Luo, Yi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2327-9125; 2327-9125
• DOI: 10.1364/PRJ.411863

The data rate of a visible light communication (VLC) system is basically determined by the electrical-to-optical (E-O) bandwidth of its light-emitting diode (LED) source. In order to break through the intrinsic limitation of the carrier recombination rate on E-O bandwidth in conventional c-plane LEDs based on InGaN quantum wells, a blue micro-LED with an active region of nano-structured InGaN wetting layer is designed, fabricated, and packaged to realize a high-speed VLC system. The E-O bandwidth of the micro-LED can reach up to 1.3 GHz. Based on this high-speed micro-LED, we demonstrated a data rate of 2 Gbps with a bit error rate (BER) of 1.2 × 10 − 3 with simple on-off keying signal for a 3-m real-time VLC. In addition, a 4-Gbps VLC system using quadrature phase shift keying-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing with a BER of 3.2 × 10 − 3 is also achieved for the same scenario. Among all the point-to-point VLC systems based on a single-pixel LED, this work has the highest distance-bandwidth product of 3 GHz·m and the highest distance-rate product of 12 Gbps·m.