A 3.8-Gbps Yellow-light Visible Light Communication System utilizing a Si-substrate LED and a Novel Cascaded Pre-Equalizer Network

Recently, visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a promising communication method in 6G. To achieve 6G high-speed transmission, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based VLC systems are a highly promising candidate. However, the “yellow and green gap” greatly limits the yellow light efficiency of InGaN-based LEDs and also restricts the transmission rate of yellow LEDs. In addition, pre-equalization and post-equalization also have an important impact on high-speed communication. In this paper, we propose to employ a vertical InGaN-based Si-substrate yellow LED with bit-power loading discrete multitone (DMT) modulation and a novel cascaded pre-equalizer network to achieve a high-speed yellow-light VLC system. The proposed cascaded pre-equalizer network is based on a digital Zobel network and a partial nonlinear pre-equalizer (DZNPN). The microscopic time-domain transient response of the high-speed and large-amplitude signal is also investigated to show a severe impairment. Utilizing the DZNPN cascaded pre-equalizer network based on the third-order Volterra series, a record-breaking data rate of 3.764Gbps over 1.2 m free space and 3.808Gbps over 0.7 m are experimentally demonstrated under the hard decision-forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10−3. The rate can be improved from 2.818Gbps to 3.764Gbps with 650Mbaud compared to the un-preprocessed signal. This is the highest data rate ever reported for yellow-light VLC systems based on a single LED to the best of our knowledge.