High speed visible-light communication using organic light-emitting diodes based on fluorescent and phosphorescent emitters (dataset)

Visible light communications (VLCs) using organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are a promising technology because of unique features of OLEDs such as arbitrary sizes and shapes, and providing a glare-free illumination. However, the reported best data transmission rate of OLEDs in VLC, so far, are quite low (~50 Mbps), even in unpractical short data link (12.5 cm). To enhance the data rate, high signal-to-noise-ratio and high modulation bandwidth is required. Here, we report a systematic investigation of OLEDs, in particular, the influence of light emitting materials and device size. Because both points are related on both signal-to-noise-ratio and the bandwidth, and they have fundamental trade-off in data rate, the understanding of the influence on the data rate will be basics to improve furthermore the date rate. However, in the early stage of development of OLEDs for VLCs, their influence were not investigated. Through the investigation, we found that a conventional fluorescent emitter, 2,5,8,11-tetra-tert-butylperylene, with the smallest device area of 1.2 × 10-3 cm2 are important to achieve higher data transmission rate. That means that the enhancement of data rate by increasing the bandwidth is much effective than the enhancement of the data rate by increasing radiance. Through these investigation, we achieved a record data transmission rate of 663 Mbps with an implementation of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, which is the 13 fold improvement of the data rate from the best data rate reported so far even in more practical 2 m data link.