Digitally controlled micro-LED array for linear visible light communication systems

Abstract

In a visible light communications (VLC) system, the frequency response of the light-emitting diode (LED) limits the signal bandwidth and, thus, becomes the bottleneck of the transmission data rate. The recent technology breakthrough of the micro-LED array has the potential to improve the modulation bandwidth of the LED by ten times. On the other hand, the nonlinearity of the micro-LED array is significant. Nonlinear distortion degrades system performance in both the achievable data rate and the transmission range. In this paper, we propose a digitally controlled micro-LED array architecture for the VLC system, which enjoys the benefit of wide modulation bandwidth of the micro-LED array and avoids the disadvantage of the nonlinear distortion. Compared with existing multiple LED structures, the proposed micro-LED array architecture shows robustness against nonlinear distortion.