Effects of LED device size on UV-C short-range LoS optical wireless communication

Hill, Jordan and Chen, Cheng and Xie, Enyuan and McKendry, Jonathan J.D. and Herrnsdorf, Johannes and Gu, Erdan and Haas, Harald and Dawson, Martin D. (2023) Effects of LED device size on UV-C short-range LoS optical wireless communication. IEEE Photonics Journal, 15 (6). 7305108. ISSN 1943-0655 (https://doi.org/10.1109/JPHOT.2023.3329980)

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Abstract

We report systematic investigation of the device-size-dependent performance of ultraviolet C (UV-C) light emitting diodes (LEDs) for optical wireless communication (OWC). Utilizing 273 nm-wavelength devices with diameters in the range of 40 μ m to 300 μ m, the size-dependent electrical, optical and frequency response characteristics of AlGaN UV-C LEDs are analyzed. As the junction area scales down, the smaller devices present lower optical power but faster modulation speed. Based on a 1-m point-to-point OWC system, this study further explores the LED size effect on the communication performance including channel gain, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), theoretical Shannon capacity, achievable data transmission rate, relevant ratio, and spectral efficiency (SE). The system employing a 60 μ m diameter (micro) LED transmitter achieves the highest average SNR and SE accompanying a data transmission rate up to a 5.53 Gbps at the forward error correction floor of 3.8 ×10−3 . These results suggest an optimal device diameter of ∼ 60 μ m for further development of high-performance UV-C short-range line-of-sight (LoS) OWC.

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