PureLiFi Tells LEDs Magazine That “Laser Light Will Better Serve LiFi”
Photo credit: pureLiFi
pureLiFi
This week, pureLiFi recently informed LEDs Magazine that “laser light will better serve LiFi,” and is currently working on a laser-based “Light Antenna Module” for embedding into consumer devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, etc…
pureLiFi develops technology for communication networks that integrates data and lighting utility infrastructures. It offers a LiFi enabled device that converts the beam of lights into an electrical signal. The signal is then converted back into data. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Edinburgh.
The move to laser chips could well become the industry’s “shooting star” moment, replacing the propellers of LEDs according to a recent article from LEDs Magazine.
“New technologies such as laser light…will better serve LiFi component and system companies to ensure that breakthrough innovations in the lighting devices industry are readily linked to LiFi so that lighting and LiFi become inseparable from the start,” a pureLiFi spokesperson told LEDs Magazine after their recent article in which they pointed out that co-founder Haas had surfaced as an advisor to laser stalwart Kyocera SLD, which is helping to develop a laser LiFi system for the aviation industry. Haas is also pureLiFi’s chief scientific officer.
LEDs Magazine further asked pureLiFi whether the company itself was embracing a switch to lasers.
The spokesperson further said that the Light Antenna Module, released in 2021, uses an infrared laser chip. The module is intended to be small enough to reside inside smartphones and is available to device makers. PureLiFi is also positioning its laser components for use inside the access points that send and receive data to and from those devices, the spokesperson told LEDs Magazine.
“Professor Haas remains a committed co-founder and chief scientific officer of pureLiFi and we are supportive of the work he’s doing to advance and improve the LiFi ecosystem,” she said. The “ecosystem” improvements include a migration toward laser technology.
The pureLiFi spokesperson pointed out that Haas is actively engaged in leading the LiFi Research and Development Centre (LRDC), an academic/industry group based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. That group has published research showing laser LiFi’s faster speeds.
Two years ago, Haas told LEDs Magazine that, compared to LEDs, lasers “can go an order of magnitude faster.” At the time, pureLiFi LED systems were operating experimentally at about 1 Gbit/s (slower in the real world), but Haas enthused that, with lasers, “I see a clear path to 100 Gbit/s in the next year or two, and we are looking at 1 Tbit/s in the next five years.”
Terabit Bidirectional Multi-user Optical Wireless System (TOWS) for 6G LiFi
Professor Haas has also been part of a five-year, multi-university project called the Terabit Bidirectional Multi User Optical Wireless System for 6G (TOWS), which with £8 million in UK government funding hopes to hit 1 Tbit/s by 2024. Leeds University is currently leading TOWS along with the University of Cambridge. The vision of this ambitious project is to develop and experimentally demonstrate multiuser Terabit/s optical wireless systems that offer capacities at least two orders of magnitude higher than the current planned 5G optical and radio wireless systems, with a roadmap to wireless systems that can offer up to four orders of magnitude higher capacity.
There are four features of the proposed system which make possible such unprecedented capacities to enable this disruptive advance.
Firstly, unlike visible light communications (VLC), the infrared spectrum will be exploited, and this will provide a solution to the light dimming problem associated with VLC, eliminating uplink VLC glare and thus supporting bidirectional communications.
Secondly, to make possible much greater transmission capacities and multi-user, multi-cell operation, a new type of LED-like steerable laser diode array will be introduced, which does not suffer from the speckle impairments of conventional laser diodes while ensuring ultrahigh-speed performance.
Thirdly, with the added capacity, native OW multi-user systems will be developed to share the resources, these being adaptively directional to allow full coverage with the reduced user and inter-cell interference and finally incorporate RF systems to allow seamless transition and facilitate overall network control, in essence, to introduce software-defined radio to optical wireless. This means that OW multi-user systems can readily be designed to allow very high aggregate capacities as beams can be controlled in a compact manner.
Fourthly, the project will help in developing advanced inter-cell coding and handover for our optical multi-user systems and because of this, it will also allow seamless handover with radio systems when required such as for resilience.
pureLiFi is also a founding member of the Light Communications Alliance, where the spokesperson noted the company works with several other companies to advance LiFi. Those companies span the LiFi ecosystem, including mobile network operators and device makers, as well as companies that could be considered pureLiFi competitors like Signify and the French LiFi company Oledcomm.
Professor Haas is also part of a team from different institutions examining a technique called RIS that could lessen the need for LiFi to have a direct line of sight and thus expand the technology’s physical distance reach.
“RIS emerged recently as a revolutionary concept that transfers the physical propagation environment into a fully controllable and customizable space in a low-cost, low-power fashion,” states the paper’s authors, led by Hanaa Abumarshoud, a research fellow in electronic and electrical engineering at the Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde.
A 2020 article from IEEE Spectrum stated that replacing radio waves with laser light could boost the speed and reach of communications far beyond that promised by 5G. This could enable autonomous cars to talk to each other, enable drones to send high-resolution photos to the ground, and move large volumes of data around smart factories and smart homes.
“There's loads of data that are being accumulated and are being moved around,” says Paul Rudy, chief marketing officer at SLD. “You need to transmit data and you need to do it at [long] range with as fast a data rate as possible.”
Rudy hopes to focus on applications that are data-heavy and require stable connections over a broad range of distances. Those need data rates of many gigabits per second over ranges of perhaps hundreds of meters. Lasers can achieve that at lower power and with less difficulty than RF equipment, Rudy says. As for cars, “You already have headlights in the vehicle,” he says. “Being able to broadcast data from those existing illumination sources can save lots of energy and also save the overall system cost.”
At CES 2020, the company demonstrated data rates of 20 Gb/s with its laser LiFi. The 5G wireless communication that is currently being rolled out should make possible rates of at least 1 Gb/s and could eventually reach 10 Gb/s.
Article source: https://www.ledsmagazine.com/smart-lighting-iot/article/14212189/purelifi-working-laser-chips-into-its-technology
What is LiFi?
Li-Fi, also known as "Light Fidelity" is a wireless optical networking technology, which uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit data. In 2011, professor Harald Haas made a LiFi demonstration at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Global Talk on Visible Light Communication (VLC).
VLC uses light as a medium to deliver high-speed communication like Wi-Fi and complies with the IEEE standard IEEE 802.15.7. The IEEE 802.15.7 is a high-speed, bidirectional, and fully networked wireless communication technology-based standard similar to Wi-Fi's IEEE 802.11.
How does LiFi work?
LiFi is a high speed, bidirectional, and fully networked wireless communication of data using light. LiFi constitutes of several light bulbs that form a wireless network.
When an electrical current goes through to a LED light bulb, a stream of light (photons) emits from the lamp. LED bulbs are semiconductor devices, which means that the brightness of the light flowing through them can change at extremely high speeds. The signal is sent by modulating the light at different rates. The signal can then be received by a detector that interprets the changes in light intensity (the signal) as data. Also when the LED is ON, you transmit a digital 1, and when it is OFF, you transmit a 0.
LiFi Benefits
The primary benefits of LiFi are as follows:
• Security: Provides entirely secure access. Where there is no light there is no data.
• Safety: Does not produce electromagnetic radiation and does not interfere with existing electronic systems.
• Localisation: Allows localisation due to the small coverage area of LiFi access point - localisation can be used for very precise asset tracking.
• Data density: Provides ubiquitous high-speed wireless access that offers substantially greater data density (data rate per unit area) than RF through high bandwidth reuse.
Credit to Signify
LiFi Applications
LiFi can be used for so many applications and the list is increasing every year. You can read our updated list of LiFi applications at the following link:
Credit to pureLiFi
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