Micro-LED LiFi: Where every light source in the world is also TV, and provides gigabit internet access

• By Sebastian Anthony on june 21, 2014 at 11:03 pm
• 17 Comments

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Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland has begun the task of bringing high-speed, ubiquitous, LiFi technology to market. If Martin Dawson and Harald Haas have their way, any illuminated device — your TV, your bedside lamp, a road sign, a train or airport timetable — might soon double up as a wireless LiFi hotspot.

LiFi, as you may have guessed, stands for Light-Fidelity — as in, Wireless-Fidelity (WiFi), but using visible light instead of gigahertz radio waves. How LiFi works is very simple: You have an a light on one end (an LED in this case), and a photodetector (light sensor) on the other. If the LED is on, the photodetector registers a binary one; otherwise it’s a binary zero. Flash the LED enough times and you build up a message. Use an array of LEDs, and perhaps a few different colors, and very soon you are dealing with data rates in the range of hundreds or megabits per second. (See: 1Gbps wireless network made with red and green laser pointers.)

At the moment, commercial LEDs don’t get much smaller than 1mm². The Scottish researchers, however, are developing LEDs that are just 1μm² — one micron; one thousand times smaller. Not only can you cram more of these micron-sized LEDs into the same space as a larger LED, but apparently they can also flicker on and off 1,000 times faster. A grid of 1,000 micro-LEDs, flashing 1,000 times faster, would be able to transmit data a million times faster than a normal LED.

Furthermore, these micro-LEDs are ultimately just pixels — and at one micron, these LEDswould be a lot smaller than those in your smartphone’s Retina display. You could have a huge array of these LEDs that double up as a room’s light source and a display — and provides networking capability on the side. Perhaps a next-next-gen console would communicate with your gamepad, smartphone, and other peripherals via a LiFi-equipped TV. How about a highway lighting that illuminates the road, provides up-to-date traffic info/warnings, and provides internet access to your car, plus all of the devices on-board?

On a more general level, LiFi might be used to extend wireless networks throughout the home, workplace, and in commercial areas. LiFi is restricted by line of sight, so it won’t ever replace WiFi, but it could augment it nicely. Instead of trying to find the perfect sweet spot for your home’s WiFi router, it would be much simpler if every light in your house simply acted as a wireless network bridge. I can just imagine it now: People clustering underneath street lights, strip lights, and billboards, clamoring for their fix of high-speed interwebs.