Design of High-Speed Visible Light Communication (VLC) Transmitter Circuit Based on Discrete Components for VLC-Based Internet of Things (IoT) Data Communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has great potential to be implemented in Internet of Things (IoT) application to create a cost-effective high-speed IoT data communication system. As the VLC system is generally implemented using Integrated Cicuit (IC) technology, it suffers from high-cost problem, especially due to the difficulties in the access to this technology. The research presented in this paper attempts to unlock the potential capabilities of discrete components, which have a fairly good high-frequency performance in a cost-effective manner, in the design of a wideband and efficient VLC transmitter circuit. To achieve this goal, several stages are carried out in this research, such as selecting the optimum transmitter topology, the size of LED array, the type of transistor, as well as the optimum value of supply voltage (V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CC</inf>) and resistor. The simulation result shows that the proposed VLC transmitter circuit obtained a transconductance gain value of -1.82 dB, while achieving the transmitter bandwidth value of 24.54 MHz with a quite high value of DC power efficiency which is more than 92%.