Owing to high energy efficiency, high reliability and low cost, solid-state lighting using LEDs is progressively becoming popular in recent years. Due to their inherent fast response, LEDs can also be used for visible light communication (VLC). The modulation frequency is far beyond the flicker fusion threshold of human beings that the basic illumination of LEDs would not be affected. VLC is projected to relief the spectrum demands for RF communication. Recently, VLC systems for different applications under environments have been extensively studied In particular, IEEE has released a standard, IEEE 802.15.7 on visible-light communication Personal Area Network (VPAN) in which both a physical layer (PHY) and a medium access control (MAC) layer are defined and various network topologies...[ Read more ]

Owing to high energy efficiency, high reliability and low cost, solid-state lighting using LEDs is progressively becoming popular in recent years. Due to their inherent fast response, LEDs can also be used for visible light communication (VLC). The modulation frequency is far beyond the flicker fusion threshold of human beings that the basic illumination of LEDs would not be affected. VLC is projected to relief the spectrum demands for RF communication. Recently, VLC systems for different applications under environments have been extensively studied In particular, IEEE has released a standard, IEEE 802.15.7 on visible-light communication Personal Area Network (VPAN) in which both a physical layer (PHY) and a medium access control (MAC) layer are defined and various network topologies are provided.

In this dissertation, a VLC transceiver system compliant with the type-I physical layer (PHY-I) defined in IEEE 802.15.7 is designed and implemented. The transmitter SoC, including a baseband (BB), a DC-DC boost LED driver and a dimmer, was fabricated in a 0.35μm CMOS process. Experimental results demonstrate that a maximum output power of 8W can be achieved with an efficiency of 83%, while the transmitter generates VLC signals comply with the coding and modulation schemed as defined in the standard. On the other hand, the receiver composed of an analog front-end and a digital baseband was implemented with off-the-shelf components and in an FPGA development board, respectively. The RX features a bandwidth of 4MHz and a transimpedance gain of 100dBΩ. With OOK modulation, the whole VLC transceiver system measures a data rate of 266kb/s with PER <10% at a distance of 2.2m.