Tuned Three-Level Flying Capacitor Power Amplifier for Visible Light Communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a wireless communication technology that uses visible light to send data. The most popular implementation of a VLC driver is made up of a DC-DC converter, in charge of biasing a set of High-Brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs), and a Linear Power Amplifier (LPA), that injects the communication signal component. In this work, a Switching-Mode Power Amplifier (SMPA) based on a tuned three-level Flying Capacitor (FC) topology is proposed as an alternative to overcome the poor power efficiency of the aforementioned LPAs. In comparison to other SMPA topologies, the proposed SMPA is able to reproduce Single-Carrier Modulation (SCM) schemes with a higher bandwidth due to the proposed phase-shift control strategy and the use of a multilevel approach. A prototype reproducing a SCM scheme was tested, achieving a peak power efficiency of 96% and improving the efficiency results of other existing SMPAs approaches that were previously proposed for this kind of applications.