This paper presents the complete link budget analysis of a VLC system. By calculating the transmitter's emitted power, the channel path loss and the receiver's input referred noise, the system SNR and BER performance are derived. Furthermore, a VLC transceiver system is implemented with the analog front-end using discrete components while the baseband in FPGA, and the experimental results demonstrate that the measured BER agrees well with the calculation.Index Terms -Bit error rate, light emitting diodes, link budget analysis, photodiode, visible light communication.