We demonstrate cascade green Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) arrays, which have superior output-power to single LED without sacrificing modulation-bandwidth. 80Mbit/sec eye-opening with a 0.65mW coupled power to plastic-optical-fiber is achieved under the output of in-car battery (12V).
I. IntroductionHigh-speed red light-emitting diodes (LEDs) [1,2] often serve as key transmitter components for communication networks using plastic optical fibers (POFs). According to the media-oriented systems transport (MOST) standard they must run at a data rate of 22.5Mb/s [1,2]. However, the optical bandwidth of the red operating window (~650nm) of the current commercially used polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) POF is narrower, and the propagation loss higher (0.125dB/m vs. 0.09dB/m) than that of the high-performance POF system [3]. This operates under a PMMA loss minimum window, which has a wavelength of around 500nm [3]. The III-nitride-based green LEDs would thus be a more promising choice for such applications [3,4]. Furthermore, as compared to the GaAs based red RCLEDs or LEDs, the power and speed performance of III-nitride based LEDs is much less sensitive to the ambient temperature, which is a key issue for in-car application [1][2][3]. However, the speed and power performance of high-speed GaN based green LED is usually poorer than those of reported red high-speed RCLED [2][3][4]. In this paper, we demonstrate a cascade GaN three green LEDs array without using the complex and high-cost distributed-Bragg-reflector (DBR) structure in RCLED. Such device can have a three times larger active area with a three times higher differential efficiency than that of a single LED and sustain a similar modulation bandwidth performance [5]. A clear eye-opening at 80Mbit/sec with a 0.65mW coupled power to POF under the constant voltage bias of in-car battery output (12V) have been achieved simultaneously. The additional transformer-circuits or expensive constant bias current source is not necessary by use of such scheme of bias [6].