Rapid Development of System-on-Chip (SoC) for Network-Enabled Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an emerging optical communication technology with rapid development nowadays. VLC is considered as a compliment and successor of radio-frequency (RF) wireless communication. There are various typical implementations of VLC in which one of them is for exchanging data TCP/IP packets, thus the user can browse the internet as in established Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology. Briefly, we can call it by Light fidelity (Li-Fi). This paper described the design and implementation of System-on-Chip (SoC) subsystem for Li-Fi application where the implemented SoC consists of hardware (H/W) and software (S/W). In the H/W aspect, Physical Layer (PHY) is made by using UART communication with Ethernet connection to communicate with Host/Device personal-computer (PC). In the S/W aspect, Xillinux operating system (OS) is used. The H/W- as well as S/W-SoC, are realized in FPGA Zybo Zynq-7000 EPP development board. The functional test result shows (without optical channel or Zybo-to-Zybo only) that the implemented SoC is working as expected. It is able to exchange TCP/IP packets between two PCs. Moreover, Ethernet connection has bandwidth up to 83.6 Mbps and PHY layer baud rate has bandwidth up to 921600 bps.