A Bright Future for Semipolar Materials in Visible Light Communication
In October of 2019, a publication titled Polarized monolithic white semipolar (20-21) InGaN light-emitting diodes grown on high quality (20-21) GaN/sapphire templates and its application to visible light communication ⁽¹⁾ was published in the world-renowned journal, Elsevier Nano Energy. This article verified the applicability of semi-polar GaN materials in the field of visible light communication.
Elsevier, founded in 1880, is a leading publishing and analytics company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Elsevier publishes more than 470,000 articles annually in 2,500 journals. Its publications include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and Current Opinion series of journals, the online citation database Scopus, and the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, digital tools for data-management, instruction and assessment. ⁽²⁾
The paper details the findings of the group at University of California in Santa Barbara, and their accomplishment of the first demonstration of efficient polarized monolithic white (20-21) semi-polar LEDs grown on low-cost, high-quality 4-inch sapphire substrate. On one hand, the polarized white light can be widely used as the backlight for liquid crystal display (LCDs) due to its higher converted efficiency and better performance compared to traditional c-plane LEDs. On the other hand, the monolithic white semi-polar LEDs overcome the limitation of the slow response for the yellow phosphor converted commercial white LEDs, thus can be used as the light source to enable a high speed in visible light communication (VLC). This research proves the feasibility of fabricating efficient polarized monolithic white semi-polar LEDs on sapphire substrate as well as the advantages of semi-polar GaN in the application of visible light communication.
Visible light communication technology refers to a data communication method which uses light in a visible spectrum as information carrier to transmit an optical signal, and is one feasible solution to achieve 5G communication. Advantages of VLC technology include high speed, high efficiency, wide availability and excellent security. Thus, the LED growth technology based on semi-polar GaN materials will bring in a potential breakthrough in VLC applications. In the near future, we expect to integrate this technology with existing technologies, such as Wi-Fi and cellular networks, bringing innovative applications and experience value in communication for customers.
⁽¹⁾ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211285519309437
⁽²⁾ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier