High-Bandwidth Micro-LED Serving as Photodetector Toward 10-Gbps Visible Light Communication

In this work, we fabricated a green micro-LED on sapphire substrates and proposed it as a high-speed photodetector for visible light communication (VLC). We tested the photocurrent and frequency response characteristics of the device. A record modulation bandwidth of 878.8 MHz was achieved by a 20 μm device at a reverse bias voltage of − 50 V. A 20 μm single micro-LED was used as a PD in the VLC system with a free space transmission distance of 0.3 m, and a maximum communication rate of 9.9279 Gbps was achieved below the forward error correction (FEC) limit of 3.8×10 ^-3 by the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme and a bit-loading algorithm.