VLC with organic photonic components

In recent years, organic small molecule and polymer light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodetectors (PDs) have been used as optoelectronic components in visible light communications (VLC). The first study appeared in [1] which demonstrated that data transmission rates in the hundreds of kb/s region are possible. This was further improved by using advanced modulation formats such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) [2]. Ethernet transmission speeds were reported for the first time in [3] and were achieved using the multilayer perceptron artificial neural network equalization technique. The current state-of-the-art transmission speeds available in organic VLC (OVLC) transmission is 55 Mb/s using aggregated wavelength multiplexed data streams [4]. This chapter gives an overview of organic-based VLC focusing on the LED technology trends, organic LED (OLED)-based devices, the organic semiconductors, and visible light PDs. To enhance the OLED-based VLC links blue filtering and a number of equalization schemes including artificial neural network equalizer, decision feedback equalizer, and linear equalizer are discussed and their performance are compared and contrasted. Finally an experimental all-organic VLC system employing both OLED and organic PDs employing artificial neural network base equalizer is introduced and its performance is evaluated. The chapter is completed with concluding remarks.