A 130 nm CMOS Receiver for Visible Light Communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that has been gaining attention over the last few years. Transmission of data at higher rates in a VLC system is mainly limited by the modulation bandwidth of the employed LED. To alleviate this limitation, equalization is frequently employed. This is usually achieved by either using discrete circuit elements or in digital form. In this paper, we present a power-efficient VLC receiver as a system-on-chip, implemented in 130 nm CMOS technology. The proposed receiver supports LEDs with different bandwidths thanks to the switchable equalizer. We tested the proposed receiver using phosphorescent white LEDs with different bandwidths on an experimental VLC link. For each tested LED, around 20 fold improvement in data rate was achieved compared to the original bandwidth of the LED. For the LED with a modulation bandwidth of 1.6 MHz, data rates of 32 Mbps and 50 Mbps at a BER of 102 were obtained at a distance of 2 meters without and with a blue filter, respectively.