Visible light communication(VLC) is an emerging technology in optical wireless communication(OWC) that has attracted worldwide research in recent years. VLC can combine communication and illumination together, which could be applied in many application scenarios such as visible light communication local area networks(VLANs), indoor localization, and intelligent lighting. In recent years, pioneering and significant work have been made in the field of VLC. In this paper, an overview of the recent progress in VLC is presented. We also demonstrate our recent experiment results including bidirectional 100 Mbit/s VLAN or Li-Fi system based on OOK modulation without blue filter. The VLC systems that we proposed are good solutions for high-speed VLC application systems with low-cost and low-complexity. VLC technology shows a bright future due to its inherent advantages, shortage of RF spectra and ever increasing popularity of white LEDs.
We numerically investigate the electromagnetic properties of tellurium dielectric resonator metamaterial at the infrared wavelengths. The transmission spectra, effective permittivity and permeability of the periodic tellurium metamaterial structure are investigated in detail. The linewidth of the structure in the direction of magnetic field W x has effects on the position and strength of the electric resonance and magnetic resonance modes. With appropriately optimizing the geometric dimensions of the designed structure, the proposed tellurium metamaterial structure can provide electric resonance mode and high order magnetic resonance mode in the same frequency band. This would be helpful to analyze and design low-loss negative refraction index metamaterials at the infrared wavelengths.
On the silicon-on-insulator platform,an ultra compact temperature-insensitive modulator based on a cascaded microring assistant Mach-Zehnder interferometer is proposed and demonstrated with numerical simulation.According to the calculated results,the tolerated variation of ambient temperature can be as high as 134℃while the footprint of such a silicon modulator is only 340μm^2.
A horizontally slotted photonic crystal nanobeam cavity with an embedded active nanopillar structure is proposed for ultrafast direct modulation. By designing the thicknesses of both the nanobeam and the horizontal slot layer, the quality factor (Q factor) and the mode volume (Vn ) of the proposed cavity can be engineered independently. As a result, the spontaneous emission (SpE) rate is enhanced with a small Vn of 2.4 while the SpE rate and the cavity photon lifetime have an optimal Q factor of ～ 1000. In our simulation, the modulation bandwidth could be enhanced up to 170 GHz with different emission linewidths of the active nanopillar.
Silicon photonics is an emerging competitive solution for next-generation scalable data communications in different application areas as high-speed data communication is constrained by electrical interconnects.Optical interconnects based on silicon photonics can be used in intra/inter-chip interconnects, board-to-board interconnects, short-reach communications in datacenters, supercomputers and long-haul optical transmissions. In this paper, we present an overview of recent progress in silicon optoelectronic devices and optoelectronic integrated circuits(OEICs) based on a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor-compatible process, and focus on our research contributions. The silicon optoelectronic devices and OEICs show good characteristics, which are expected to benefit several application domains, including communication, sensing, computing and nonlinear systems.
The characteristics of the photonic crystal vertical cavity surface emitting lasers(PhC-VCSELs) were investigated by using the full vector finite-difference time-domain(FDTD) method through the transverse mode loss analysis. PhC-VCSELs with different photonic crystal structures were analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Through combining the dual mode confinement of oxide aperture and seven-point-defect photonic crystal structure, the PhC-VCSELs with low threshold current of 0.9 mA and maximum output power of 3.1 mW operating in single fundamental mode were demonstrated. Mode loss analysis method was proven as a reliable and useful way to analyze and optimize the PhC-VCSELs.
We present a high-speed visible light communication(VLC) link that uses a commercially available phosphorescent white light-emitting diode(LED). Such devices have few megahertz bandwidth due to the slow response of phosphorescent component,which severely limit the transmission data rate of VLC system. We propose a simple pre-emphasis circuit. With blue-filtering and the pre-emphasis circuit,the bandwidth of VLC system can be enhanced from 3 to 77.6 MHz,which allows non-return-to-zero on-off-keying(NRZ–OOK) data transmission up to 200 Mb/s with the bit error ratio of 5.3 × 10-7 which is below 10-6. The VLC link operates at the room illumination level of ~1000 lx at 1.1 m range using a single 1 W white LED.
