Passive Visible-to-Telecom Converter Using Tunable Perovskites and Silicon Photonics

Visible-to-telecom converter, which converts the information from visible light to infrared telecommunication band, has huge potential in applications such as remote monitoring of visible light communication (VLC) links or sunlight illuminance in uninhabited regions to data centers. However, the existing converters based on parametric process suffer from high energy consumption, and a requirement of extra pumping supply. Herein we propose a passive visible-to-telecom converter by combining a perovskite solar cell with a silicon photonic chip, and further demonstrate its typical application scenario in monitoring VLC links. We succeed in converting the VLC signal with 200 kHz modulated rate into infrared light and transmitting it over 5-km-fiber without distortion. Thanks to the tunable bandgap properties of perovskite materials in perovskite solar cell, we double the capacity of a VLC link with a wavelength division multiplexing strategy. This visible-to-telecom converter via hybrid of perovskite and silicon photonics reveals potentials as a large range distributed visible-light sensor network converging on an optical interconnect data center.