Paper

My Seventh Paper

This work was presented at the 2021 IEEE Photonics Conference. In this work, I explore using SiPMs with optical wireless communications

Abstract

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular modulation scheme, which requires a linear channel. Unfortunately, the most sensitive receivers for visible light communications, silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), have a non-linear response. Despite this incompatibility, results from an easily implemented method of combining OFDM and SiPMs are shown to successfully limit the bit error rate to below the limit required by forward error correction.

Key Findings

SiPMs (Silicon Photomultipliers) are capable of detecting individual photons, but their detection mechanism introduces non-linearity in response to varying light intensities. This non-linearity becomes significant when using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation, which assumes a linear channel. Conventional methods of loading OFDM sub-carriers fail at lower light intensities due to SiPM’s non-linear response. However, a new method has been developed and successfully used to load the OFDM sub-carriers, achieving a data rate of 453 Mbps.