A Survey on Recent Advances in Organic Visible Light Communications

Visible light communication (VLC) employs light emitting diodes (LEDs) to provide illumination and data communications simultaneously. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) employing small molecules and long-chain polymers PLEDs, have been gaining attention within the VLC research community due to their inherent advantages such as flexible substrates and low-cost manufacturing. However, the carrier mobility of organic semiconductors is much slower than the devices composed of metal alloys, such as gallium nitride, thus leading to a restriction in the OLED modulation bandwidth. The manufacturing processes, materials and the photoactive size of the devices can affect the raw bandwidth of OLEDs. To increase the transmission speeds, novel approaches have been proposed including equalization techniques, signalling schemes and the optimum driver circuits. The paper provides a survey on the evolution of OLED-based VLC systems, and the respective challenges and recent progresses.