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Low-power communication with a photonic heat pump

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Abstract

An optical communication channel is constructed using a heated thermo-electrically pumped, high efficiency infrared light-emitting diode (LED). In these devices, electro-luminescent cooling is observed, resulting in greater than unity (> 100%) efficiency in converting electrical power to optical power. The average amount of electrical energy required to generate a photon (4.3 meV) is much less than the optical energy in that photon (520 meV). Such a light source can serve as a test-bed for fundamental studies of energy-efficient bosonic communication channels. In this low energy consumption mode, we demonstrate data transmission at 3 kilobits per second (kbps) with only 120 picowatts of input electric power. Although the channel employs a mid-infrared source with limited quantum efficiency, a binary digit can be communicated using 40 femtojoules with a bit error rate of 3 x 10−3.

© 2014 Optical Society of America

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Figures (4)

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 (a) An illustration of the free-space optical channel used in this experiment. Light from an In0.15Ga0.85As0.13Sb0.87 LED emitting at 2.5μm at 167°C is collected using a cooled InGaAs photodiode operating at zero bias. (b) Wall-plug efficiency versus emitted optical power for the LED. This data was acquired using two different receiver circuits: a digital lock-in amplifier and a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter. Both measurements indicate an inverse relationship between efficiency and light power. The inset shows L-I and I-V curves for the LED, using a combination of the ADC and the lock-in for low bias conditions, and a DC measurement at high bias conditions. We note that in modeling the LED, the collector efficiency was a fitting parameter [5]. Therefore, any uncertainty in converting photocurrent at the detector to optical power would appear equally in both the data and the model, but would not affect the 1/L power-law relationship between efficiency and power.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2 (a) Block diagram of the LED communication channel. (b) 8-symbol phase shift keyed coding with seven symbols equally spaced in phase, and the last symbol at zero magnitude. The centroids of each symbol are also labeled. (c) Received signal from an orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) channel depicting orthogonal channels with 1Hz spacing; channels at 1000, 1002, 1004, and 1008Hz are transmitting nonzero symbols.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3 (a) Bit error rate (BER) versus energy per bit at various data rates. The curves show the theoretical bit error rate assuming a flat noise power spectrum and varying the magnitude of the current signal driving the LED. Input power can be related to energy per bit by Eq. (2). (b) The inset containing the noise spectrum of the channel indicates more noise at higher frequencies. Higher data rate experiments showed higher bit error rates at a given energy per bit as a result.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4 Bit error rate (BER) versus the energy per bit for the experimental channel, as well as extrapolations for an idealized LED-detector pair. All three curves assume 8-symbol phase shift keying.

Equations (2)

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I LED ( t )= i=1 M [ | B i | I 0 cos( 2π f i t+arg( B i ) ) ]
E= 0 t s | I LED ( t ) | 2 Rdt= I 0 2 R 2 t s i=1 M | B i | 2
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