Multifunctional Ultraviolet-C Micro-LED with Monolithically Integrated Photodetector for Optical Wireless Communication

In this paper, a multifunctional ultraviolet-C (UVC) micro-LED with monolithically integrated photodetector (PD) based on AlGaN multiple quantum wells (MQWs) was fabricated. We designed and integrated UVC LED with sizes of 40 and 300 m emitted at 277 nm on a single chip which also serve functions as PDs and further studied the performance of on-chip real-time photodetection. The photocurrent generated from one LED can well reflect the light output power of the adjacent LED. Furthermore, both 40 m UVC micro-LED and 300 m UVC LED play important roles in high speed UVC communication with a record bandwidth of 497.58 MHz for 40 m micro-LED and 467.38 MHz for 300 m LED, offering each other as backup light source in high speed UVC communication. And the data transmission rates of 1.6 Gbps for 40 m micro-LED and 1.21 Gbps for 300 m LED over 1 m link based on the 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (16-QAM-OFDM) with pre-equalization were achieved. The multifunctional UVC micro-LED monolithically integrated PD, without the need for an external PD to monitor the fluctuations in the luminescence, providing high stability for diverse applications, such as spatial wireless communication for 6G communication.