A Comparative Study of Transimpedance Amplifier (TIA) Topologies for Visible Light Communication (VLC)-Based Internet of Things (IoT) Data Communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a high-speed, secure wireless communication technology that operates in the visible light spectrum. The extensive utilization of VLC in Internet of Things (IoT) applications improves energy efficiency and data transmission by leveraging the existing lighting infrastructure. One of the key components in a VLC system is the Transimpedance Amplifier (TIA) circuit at the receiver, which converts the current output from the photodiode into a voltage signal for subsequent processing. Various TIA topologies, such as Common-Base (CB), Regulated Cascode (RGC), g<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</inf>Boosting, and Inductorless topologies, have been developed. A comparative study of the performance of these topologies under various level of DC power consumption conditions for VLC systems is needed. This paper presents a comparative analysis of these topologies, by evaluating their input resistance (R<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in</inf>) and bandwidth performances for high-speed VLC applications. The result of this study shows that among those four TIA topologies, the RGC topology provides the best performance in terms of R<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in</inf> and bandwidth across low-, medium-, and high-level DC power consumption conditions.