Brain inspired optoelectronic integrated receiver chip for wireless optical communication

Abstract

Inspired by the mechanism of visual attentional selection, a wireless optical communication (WOC) Integrated receiver consisting of a vertical double junction photodetector (VDJ-PD) and an attentional selection circuit (ASC) is presented. The whole receiver is fabricated in standard CMOS technology. The VDJ-PD can realize optical signal detection and wavelength identification. The attentional selection circuit activates the competition among the two PN junctions in VDJ-PD to select the signal with significant feature in real-time while discarding non-significant signals. A higher-order signal modulation scheme is applied by the proposed receiver to obtain a high transfer rate, and all data are decoded using color features. The optical testing results show that parallel and real-time communication of the red and blue light can be achieved, and the rise time is 4.47 μs. To measure the anti-interference performance of the receiver, a water tank is used to simulate a harsh communication environment. Results indicate that the real-time and reliable communication requirements in a harsh channel condition are satisfied. When the percentage ratio between the intensity of stray light relative to the light with maximum intensity is 84%, an accurate information decoding can still be achieved. Moreover, the whole processing procedure does not require the participation of ADC, CPU and memory, consequently avoiding the von Neumann bottleneck.