1026 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 33, NO.

18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

A High-Speed Visible Light Communication

System Using Pairs of Micro-Size LEDs
Shi Zhang , Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Zixian Wei , Zhiyuan Cao , Graduate Student Member, IEEE,
Keming Ma, Chien-Ju Chen, Meng-Chyi Wu , Yuhan Dong , Member, IEEE,
and H. Y. Fu , Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract— We designed and experimentally demonstrated a
spatial diversity visible light communication (VLC) system based
on a blue micro-size LED consisting of two parallel pixels. Since
the size-dependent effect on the electrical and optical perfor-
mance of LED, a group of such LEDs with the same structure
but different pixel sizes from 75-µm to 175-µm diameters are
fabricated and packaged to optimize the system. The exper-
imental results showed the trade-off between the modulation
depth and bandwidth. Furthermore, the system using a pair of
75-µm micro-LEDs can reach up to 1.20-Gbps data rate, which
is the highest among the packaged LED group, with the bit-error
rate (BER) below the forward error correction (FEC) floor of
3.8 × 10−3 based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) and a simple spatial diversity scheme. This work is
conducive to the system design based on large-scale micro-LED
arrays in the future.
Index Terms— Visible light communication, micro-LED,
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, spatial diversity.
I. I NTRODUCTION
V ISIBLE light communication (VLC) can provide illumi-
nation and high-speed data transmission for users simul-
taneously and has been considered as an alternative technology
for 6G networks [2]. VLC systems employing visible light
to carry the information in unlicensed band have no harm to
the body and no electromagnetic interference (EMI) to other
devices. In addition, VLC systems are energy-efficient since
Manuscript received May 18, 2021; accepted June 21, 2021. Date of
publication June 29, 2021; date of current version August 13, 2021. This work
was supported in part by the Science, Technology and Innovation Commission
of Shenzhen Municipality under Grant JCYJ20200109143016563 and Grant
JCYJ20180507183815699 and in part by the Overseas Research Cooperation
Fund of Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School under Grant
HW2018003. This letter was presented in part at the Asia Communica-
tion and Photonics Conference (ACP) 2020. [1]. (Corresponding authors:
Yuhan Dong; H. Y. Fu.)
Shi Zhang, Zhiyuan Cao, Keming Ma, and Yuhan Dong are with the Shen-
zhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055,
China, and also with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua
University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: zs19@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn;
caozy19@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn; mkm19@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn;
dongyuhan@sz.tsinghua.edu.cn).
Zixian Wei and H. Y. Fu are with the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen
Institute (TBSI), Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China (e-mail:
weizx17@tsinghua.org.cn; hyfu@sz.tsinghua.edu.cn).
Chien-Ju Chen and Meng-Chyi Wu are with the Institute of Electronics
Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300044, Taiwan (e-mail:
103063516@office365.nthu.edu.tw; mcwu@ee.nthu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more figures in this letter are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/LPT.2021.3093339.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2021.3093339
1041-1135 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
the light sources for downlink VLC systems can be integrated
in our daily illumination devices.
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are widely used in VLC
systems due to the low cost and easy integration. However,
commercial LEDs with low −3 dB electrical-to-optical (E-O)
modulation bandwidth of about 10-20 MHz limit the data rates
of VLC systems [3]. A major issue is the size of commercial
LED chip, i.e., 1 mm or greater, which introduces a relatively
large device capacitance and restrict the cut-off bandwidth of
a LED. In recent years, micro-size LEDs (micro-LEDs) have
been reported to be utilized in VLC systems. Their tiny pixel
sizes and high injected current density improve the bandwidth
up to several hundred MHz, however their tiny luminous
area also decreases the light intensity and signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) and then limits the spectrum utilization. To expand the
coverage and increase the output power, arrayed micro-LEDs
were fabricated and used in the VLC systems. Islim et al.
presented a segmented independent-driven micro-LED array
and achieved 11.95-Gbps data rate with a distance of 27.5 cm
using a single pixel of micro-LED array [4]. Xie et al. set
up a long-distance VLC system using a series-biased micro-
LED array and obtained the data rate of Gbps level over a
link extended to 20 m [5]. However, these arrayed micro-LED
systems are all point-to-point architectures, which requires a
relatively serious alignment. In addition, the pixel size and
injected current have a great effect on system performance
including bandwidth and luminous flux. Huang et al. fabri-
cated and packaged 4 × 4 arrayed micro-size LEDs, measured
and analyzed the characteristics of various pixel sizes with
different injected currents including luminous flux per pixel
and −3 dB bandwidth [6], [7].
In this letter, we consider a spatial diversity VLC system
using a pair of LED pixels which are parallelly packaged
in one shell. The transmitter employs direct current optical
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM)
modulation and bit-power allocation. Two spots at the user
end set up two receivers which adopt maximal ratio combining
(MRC) method to combine the signals from two pixels. Such
a spatial diversity structure can expand the coverage and
improve the robustness of the system in which a user can
access the network even if one of two paths is interrupted
by blockage, misalignment and etc. In addition, we have
fabricated and packaged a group of LEDs with the same
structure but different pixel sizes to verify the size-dependent

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ZHANG et al.: HIGH-SPEED VLC SYSTEM USING PAIRS OF MICRO-SIZE LEDs
Fig. 1. (a) Cross section of the blue LED, (b) photograph of the packaged
LEDs with 75, 100, 125, 150, and 175 μm pixels.
Fig. 2. Light-current-voltage curves of various size pixels with packaging.
effect of LEDs and optimize the system. There is a trade-
off between modulation depth and bandwidth, so we repeat
the experiments with different pixel sizes and compare their
performance. To the best of our knowledge, the data transmis-
sion experiments for different size pixels of micro-LEDs are
presented for the first time in this letter. Experimental results
show that 1.20-Gbps transmission rate can be achieved, which
is the highest data rate in our LED group, with 2.4 × 10−3 bit
error rate (BER) based on a 75-μm paired micro-LEDs.
II. E XPERIMENTS
A. Device Structure and Characteristics
Fig. 1(a) shows the detailed schematic structure of our
LEDs. Each pixel is grown on a c-plane sapphire substrate
using metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD).
The epitaxial structure of a LED consists of a u-GaN layer,
a N-GaN layer, a multiple quantum well (MQW), an electron
blocking layer (EBL), and a P-GaN layer. Indium tin oxide
(ITO) is deposited as current spreading layer to contact the
P-GaN layer and silicon dioxide (SiO 2) is deposited as
isolation layer. We have fabricated two identical pixels for
each diameter of 75 μm, 100 μm, 125 μm, 150 μm, and
175 μm respectively, then connected two pixels of each size
in parallel and packaged with epoxy resin. Finally, we have
obtained five packaged blue LEDs as shown in Fig. 1(b).
We have driven the two pixels simultaneously and measured
the sum of their output light power, which is twice as large as a
single pixel, the forward voltage, and −3 dB bandwidth at dif-
ferent injected currents for each LED. Fig. 2 shows the light-
current-voltage (L-I-V ) curves which illustrates that the pixel
size affects the electrical and optical characteristics obviously.
To avoid damaging a LED, we increase the injected current up
to 70 mA. Then the forward voltage and output light power
rise gradually and tend to reach saturation. The L-I-V curves
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1027
Fig. 3. −3 dB bandwidth of various size pixels at different current density.
Fig. 4. Diagram of VLC system based on DCO-OFDM and spatial diversity.
show that the light power of the large pixels is higher than that
of the small ones attributing to the larger luminous area. Fig. 3
shows the −3 dB bandwidth of each pixel with various current
density. The relationship between −3 dB cut-off  bandwidth
and current density is given by f −3 d B = B J/4qdπ 2,
which can explain why the bandwidth is higher at high current
density, where B is the bimolecular coefficient, J is the
injected current density, q is the elementary charge, and d is
the thickness of the active layer. Furthermore, the small size
pixels can reach higher bandwidth because of the high level
current density and smaller device capacitance. As a result,
the −3 dB E-O bandwidth of the 75-μm LED can reach up to
300 MHz. In addition, we can see that the values of different
pixels at the same current density are very close. This is due
to the fact that the bandwidth of LED at such scale relies
heavily on the carrier lifetime in device and carrier lifetime
depends on the current density [8]. And the RC factor has only
a little effect on the bandwidth. In a word, these experimental
results illustrate that small size pixels have better bandwidth
performance while large size pixels have better illumination
performance.
B. Experimental Setup
We set up a VLC system over a link of 0.6 m using our
packaged LEDs as shown in Fig. 4. The intended digital
signals are generated and processed in MATLAB based on
OFDM. The whole channel is divided into 255 sub-channels
where the modulation order and power are pre-allocated based
on the SNR of each channel which can be measured using error
vector magnitude (EVM) method. Pilot symbols are inserted
1028
right before the data to facilitate channel estimation. Then
Hermitian symmetry and inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT)
are imposed to generate real time-domain signal. After that,
we add cyclic prefixes (CP) to resist inter-symbol interference
(ISI) and clip the signal to decrease the peak-to-average power
ratio (PAPR). The signal approximately follows Gaussian
distribution zero mean and variance of σ 2 . We therefore cut off
the signal with values out of the range [−3.2σ, 3.2σ ] [9] and
are able to decrease the PAPR about 4 dB in the experiments.
Finally, the digital signal can be loaded into the arbitrary wave-
form generator (AWG, AWG7101, Tektronix) and converted to
analog signal. The sampling rate of AWG is adjusted according
to the modulation bandwidth of the LED.
Then the signal obtains about 20-dB gain through an
amplifier (AMP, ZX60-43+, Mini-Circuits) and incorporates
an offset by bias-T (ZFBT-6GW+, Mini-Circuits) and DC
power supply (DP832, RIGOL), which provides injected cur-
rent for the LED. Since too low current can cause obvious
nonlinear distortion and low bandwidth whereas too high
current can also cause nonlinear distortion and serious self-
heat phenomenon because of the LED saturation, the injected
current for the LED should be chosen carefully for a proper
dynamic range and bandwidth. According to our test exper-
iments, 40 mA is an appropriate current value. Then the
LED consisting of two parallel pixels is driven to emit two
beams which pass through a transmitting (TX) lens, a 0.6-m
free space and a receiving (RX) lens, and then are captured
by a high-sensitivity silicon avalanche photodiode module
(APD, APD210, Thorlabs) and converted to electrical signals
again. Finally, the two weak signals are amplified by AMPs
(ZFL-1000+, Mini-Circuits) and captured by the oscilloscope
(OSC, 73304DX, Tektronix).
The two received digital signals are also processed in
MATLAB. The high-frequency noise is first filtered by a
digital low pass filter (LPF). After CP removal, the signals
go through the fast Fourier transform (FFT) module and
frequency-domain equalizer. Note that we need to calibrate
the time cumulating phase error due to the clock deviation
between AWG and OSC. Then we combine the two signals
in each sub-channel respectively using MRC method, which
is given by
Sn = cn,1 sn,1 + cn,2 sn,2 ,
cn,1 Hn,2 = cn,2 Hn,1,
where Sn is the combined signal, sn,1 and sn,2 are the equalized
signals in the n-th sub-channel from the two pixels, cn,1 and
cn,2 are the combining coefficients, and Hn,1 , Hn,2 are the
counterpart channel gains. After combining, the data can be
retracted from Sn with BER recorded.
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
In this section, we present experimental results to demon-
strate the effectiveness of the proposed system. First, we have
measured the SNRs of different size LEDs using EVM method
with resulting curves shown in Fig. 5. We assume additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) for micro-LEDs, then the
SNR can be defined as ρ = (R H Pt )2 /σ 2 where R is the
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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 33, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2021
Fig. 5. Measured SNR of various LEDs at different frequencies.
photoelectric conversion coefficient, H is the channel gain, Pt
is the transmitting optical power, and σ 2 is the noise variance.
The noise power of each LED is roughly equivalent. Therefore,
the SNR at each sub-channel mainly depends on the output
power of the LED and the channel gain at the corresponding
frequency band. As we expected, the small size LEDs have
more flat curves but lower peak SNR based on the output light
power and bandwidth as shown in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. The SNR
curves present approximatively low-pass characteristic where
the response at DC-around frequency band subsides because
of the low gain of the bias-T and the amplifier. Since the peak
SNR depends on the output light power of the LED, a larger
light power dynamic range corresponds to higher signal ampli-
tude and modulation depth. Therefore the 175-μm LED has
the highest peak SNR of 23.26 dB, while the 75-μm LED has
the lowest peak value of 18.44 dB. However, the curves of
large size LEDs decline fast so that the performance degrades
at high frequency. As the frequency increases, the SNR curves
tend to cross which implies that a large size LED does not
necessarily have a higher SNR at all. Particularly, the 75-μm
one finally achieves the highest SNR value above 200 MHz,
which indicates that the bandwidth becomes a major factor.
In a word, there are two main factors affecting the SNR as light
power and bandwidth, respectively. The light power decides
the peak SNR of the LED and bandwidth decides the SNR
descent rate versus frequency. Therefore, the large size LED
can achieve higher modulation order but small size can use
wider bandwidth for data transmission, which is a trade-off
and should be balanced.
(1) According to the measured SNRs, the bit and power alloca-
(2) tion at each sub-channel can be applied to improve the band-
width efficiency meanwhile guaranteeing the BER lower than
the forward error correction (FEC) threshold, i.e., 3.8 × 10−3
in our case. By adjusting the bit allocation, we can obtain
several groups of experimental results as shown in Fig. 6
and Table I. Fig. 7 shows the detailed results of the 75-μm
micro-LED and presents the BER versus data rate of the
two pixels in the packaged 75-μm micro-LED without and
after combining, respectively. The data rate of the 75-μm
micro-LED can achieve 1.20 Gbps below the FEC threshold
after combining and is about 1.00 Gbps or 1.08 Gbps for a
single pixel transmission. We can see that the performance
is enhanced obviously after combining since the diversity
receiver not only collects more power but also reduces the
noise influence. Moreover, the directions and positions of the
ZHANG et al.: HIGH-SPEED VLC SYSTEM USING PAIRS OF MICRO-SIZE LEDs
Fig. 6. Bit-error rate versus data rate of various LEDs.
TABLE I
P ERFORMANCE C OMPARISON A MONG D IFFERENT S IZE LEDs
Fig. 7. Bit-power allocation and BER curves of 75-μm micro-LED.
two beams are different, especially for long distance, which
makes it difficult to converge and couple the two beams into a
narrow photodetector. Therefore, the spatial diversity receiver
is suitable for our system. In addition, the diversity structure
can expand the coverage and improve the robustness especially
in the presence of link blockage or terminal mobility [10].
From Table I and Fig. 3, we can obtain that the modulation
bandwidth of the LED is obviously higher than the −3 dB
bandwidth. For example, the −3 dB bandwidth of 75-μm pixel
at 40 mA is about 250 MHz, while the modulation bandwidth
can be 512 MHz which is the highest value in our LED group.
And the 175-μm pixel can achieve 390.6-MHz modulation
bandwidth because of the high peak SNR although it has the
lowest −3 dB bandwidth. From Fig. 6, we can see that the
100-μm, 125-μm, and 150-μm LEDs of our LED group have
BER performance worse than the 75-μm and 175-μm ones.
This is an interesting phenomenon that the 75-μm and 175-μm
LEDs have the closest BER performance in the presence of
the largest size difference.
The experimental results have presented the effect of pixel
size on bandwidth, SNR, and data rate. As mentioned earlier,
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1029
the non-monotonous effect gives a trade-off between modula-
tion depth and bandwidth. We compared various performances
of different size LEDs with parallel structure and found that
the largest and tiniest ones in our LED group, i.e., 175-μm
and 75-μm LEDs, have approximate and high data rates. It is
worth emphasizing that these two LEDs have similar data rate
not for the same reason. The 75-μm micro-LED relies on its
high bandwidth while 175-μm LED benefits from its high light
power and modulation depth. However, a large-scale micro-
LED array would overcome the light power weakness of a
small size pixel and achieve a much higher data rate expected
to over 10 Gbps after further optimization [5]. If a higher data
rate is not the only pursuit, a relatively large size pixel will be
a good choice due to its better lighting effects and stability [6].
In the future, based on the results and analyses in this work,
we can further fabricate and package more pixels in one shell,
i.e., a large-scale micro-LED array, improving the performance
and making it still easy to integrate into other devices. Similar
design like spatial diversity can also be used to expand the
coverage and enhance the robustness.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this letter, we presented a spatial diversity VLC sys-
tem in which different size LEDs with the same structure
were fabricated, packaged and installed. The experimental
results demonstrated the size-dependent effect and the trade-
off between modulation depth and bandwidth. The highest
data rate of 1.20 Gbps can be achieved by the 75-μm micro-
LED. The experiments also showed that spatial diversity is
suitable and able to enhance the performance, which provides
an alternative scheme for VLC system design.
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