A Fully Integrated IEEE 802.15.7 Visible Light Communication Transmitter With On-Chip 8-W 85% Efficiency Boost LED Driver

This paper presents an IEEE 802.15.7 Physical Layer I (PHY-I) standard compliant visible light communication (VLC) transmitter system-on-a-chip (SoC), enabling the use of ordinary white LED lights as beacons or broadcasters for location-based applications. The mixed-signal SoC integrates a baseband digital signal processing (DSP) unit, a VLC modulator, and a switching boost LED driver with an on-chip power MOSFET. The DSP unit supports various coding schemes as well as both the on-off keying (OOK) modulation and the variable pulse-position modulation specified in the aforementioned standard. The boost LED driver is designed to power a matrix of 4 × 5 LEDs using Li-ion batteries for portable applications. The SoC simultaneously supports VLC and LED illumination with nine dimming levels. Implemented in a 0.35-μm CMOS process with 20-V devices, the SoC achieves a measured VLC data rate of up to 266 kb/s at a package error rate (PER)11-1 PRBS (pseudo random binary sequence) input. The communication distance measured is more than 2 m using no optical lens with the link efficiency of 5 nJ/bit. From an input at 3-5 V, the boost converter generates an output at 6-20 V with a 92% peak efficiency and an 8-W rating.