Effects of LED Device Size on UV-C Short-Range LoS Optical Wireless Communication

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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX&quo...

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Main Authors: Jordan Hill, Cheng Chen, Enyuan Xie, Jonathan J.D. McKendry, Johannes Herrnsdorf, Erdan Gu, Harald Haas, Martin D. Dawson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023-01-01
Series:IEEE Photonics Journal
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10308704/
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Summary: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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>m to 300 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>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<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 10^{-3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. These results suggest an optimal device diameter of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula>60 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>m for further development of high-performance UV-C short-range line-of-sight (LoS) OWC.
ISSN:1943-0655