GaN FET Push–Pull Driver Circuit Enabling Power Light Emitting Diode to be a High-Efficiency, High-Speed Wireless Transmitter

A high-power, high-efficiency, and high-speed white light-emitting-diode (LED) wireless transmitter is presented in this paper. This transmitter system consists of a gallium nitride field effect transistor (GaN FET) driver with push-pull structure, freewheeling circuit, and remaining carriers sweep-out circuit based on a phosphorescent white LED. A novel push-pull circuit structure with intensity modulation is used to increase the efficiency of the proposed transmitter to 94.2% at 12 Mb/s theoretical baud rate. Generally speaking, LED transmission speed is restricted by the remaining carriers in the junction capacitance. In this paper, we introduce an improved adjustable carrier sweep-out circuit to resolve this problem. High-frequency components in the signal are preemphasized by adding parallel freewheeling diodes between the drain and source of the GaN drivers. Test results show that the power efficiency is 93.17% with -3 dB bandwidth at 8.3 MHz. The results also show that the architecture proposed in this paper allows the baud rate of the transmitter to reach 10 Mb/s with bit error rate below 10
^-5
, which meets the IEEE 802.11 b requirements at distances farther than 1 m.