Organic data transmission technology brings hope to the Internet of Things

Visible Light Communication (VLC) system is an alternative to radio-based wireless networks with a dual purpose: to provide indoor lighting and use light waves for data transmission. VLC uses modulated light as a data carrier, while the visible spectrum provides light.

Using VLC for data transmission has some advantages. It provides good bandwidth; it provides security because walls, floors and roofs will obstruct the wavelength of data transmission, thereby reducing the risk of eavesdropping; and it is cheap because it can be easily integrated into lamps, or in emerging Can be applied to displays and other surfaces during development.

So far, VLC devices usually use light-emitting diodes (LED), mainly because LED are powerful light sources. However, now, some researchers believe that the organic variant of LED OLED will be a better choice. OLED is cheaper and easier to sell. For example, they can be sprayed on or delivered by inkjet technology.

According to the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom, it is important that point-to-point links using equipment made of organic materials can solve some sustainability issues.

For a long time, the technology industry has been thinking about how to encourage the recycling of traditional electronic products that are difficult to recycle and make them economical. For example, LED are full of heavy metals. Increasingly rapid life cycle upgrades exacerbate the challenges, and as IoT deployments expand, these issues may become more urgent.

OLED may be a solution, but the data transfer rate is not so good-they are not so powerful. At Newcastle University, researchers believe that the new OLED can achieve the faster data speeds required for VLC-driven IoT communication networks. It is worth noting that OLED will be sustainable because OLED is natural, organic and does not contain heavy metals that are harmful to ecology.

OLED achieves a speed of about 10Mbps through additional equalization algorithms and wavelength division multiplexing, while the environmentally unfavorable LED can only reach a healthy speed of 35Gbps. Equalization is a process in which the energy of a specific frequency band is increased or decreased to balance the situation and increase the data rate and bandwidth.

Newcastle University OLED provides a speed of 2.2Mbps, which is sufficient for many types of IoT sensors. It is worth noting that this technology does not require power consumption, and the tedious equalization process can perform transmission. University researchers said they are using their own new information modulation technology developed internally on red to near infrared (NIR) OLED.

The researchers said in the press release: "In recent years, the increasing demand for faster data transmission speeds has shifted researchers' attention from bandwidth-constrained radio technologies to optical wireless communication systems, which provide" Practically unlimited bandwidth.

Scientists say that one potential use case is biosensing, where IoT sensors are implanted for active real-time medical monitoring. The research team stated in a paper published in the journal "Nature's Light: Science and Application" that these organic polymer devices can also be easily finally applied to point-to-point communication based on VLC-based 5G access links and display technologies.