Faster LED phosphors to boost Li-Fi data rates

August 24, 2016 // By Julien Happich

In a paper published in the ACS Photonics journal, a team of cross-disciplinary researchers from the King
Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has reported
phosphor-based white light converter with a modulation bandwidth about 40 times higher than today's
LED phosphors.
By mixing solution-processed CsPbBr3 perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) with a conventional red phosphor, they
obtained what they describe as a CsPbBr3 NC phosphor-based white light converter with a modulation
bandwidth of 491MHz, which could support high data rate up to 2 Gbit/s, much faster than Wi-Fi.
This would brake today's VLC bottleneck when using white LEDs, poor phosphor modulation capability due to
intrinsically "long" phosphorescence lifetimes.
What's more, as well as exhibiting a shorter excited lifetime, the red phosphor and perovskite composite
material yields a white light with a high colour rendering index of 89 and a correlated colour temperature of
3236 K, which makes the white LED suitable for comfort lighting applications.
Visit the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology at www.kaust.edu.sa