Polymers Brighten Hopes For Visible Light Communication

ckwu writes Today nearly all computers, tablets, and smartphones have Wi-Fi capabilities, receiving and transmitting data over a range of radio frequencies. But a burgeoning technology known as visible light communication could someday carry those data in the same light that illuminates a room. Now a tag team of semiconducting organic polymers is bringing that dream one step closer. When excited with a blue LED, the polymer pair helps to create white light that can be rapidly switched on and off to encode information. A proof-of-principle device using the polymers sent data at 350 Mbps over a distance of 5 cm with minimal errors, a rate 35 times faster than a commercially available phosphor used for blue-light color conversion.

Comments

It has its places

[Mal-2]

Upsides: Unlicensed spectrum. Pretty much unenforceable even if it was licensed. Little or no bleeding over from desired coverage areas, at least indoors. Plenty of bandwidth to go around. We know the safety profile of this sort of radiation quite well also.

Downsides: Line-of-sight only, so an AP in every room would pretty much be required (or equivalently, fiber from a central AP to every room). Probably can be degraded by "noisy" light-emitting devices, but spread-spectrum will probably get around that pretty well.

It sounds a little like using fiber optics for the last-mile problem, only in this case it's the last-meter problem and possibly without a fiber.