A 12-m 2.5-Gb/s Lighting Compatible Integrated Receiver for OOK Visible Light Communication Links

This paper presents a visible light communication (VLC) system for indoor applications. The system employs a high-sensitivity integrated circuit (IC) receiver with detection levels in the microwatts range. The proposed link is a lighting compatible VLC system enabled by the low noise floor of the IC receiver and capable of establishing a VLC link in the gigabit-per-second range with only 250 lux illuminance or 600-μW transmitted optical power from a high-speed 680-nm laser diode source. Dedicated optics is used for light steering and for focusing the transmitted power toward the receiver to maximize the collected optical power. The receiver is implemented in AMS 0.35 μm CMOS technology with integrated photodiodes. An error-free VLC link with a bit error rate (BER) −9 is measured up to 1.8 Gb/s and a VLC-compliant BER below 10 −3 is measured up to 2.5 Gb/s with on–off -keying modulation over 12 m link distance. To our knowledge, this is the first reported IC receiver-based VLC link in the Gb/s range.