Dual purpose HB-LED driver for illumination and visible light communication

The recent improvements in luminous efficacy, lifetime of the LED's and energy savings resulted in the increased usage of solid state lighting. The major advantage of LED lighting is that they can be used for Visible Light Communications. To achieve Visible Light Communication High Brightness-LED's used for illumination has to be switched fast in Multi Megahertz range to transmit the data. In this paper, average current mode controlled buck converter with illumination control and data transfer using Variable Pulse Position Modulation scheme is presented. Illumination control is achieved through PWM dimming. Simulations and experimental results demonstrating visible light communications and illumination control for the proposed dual purpose buck converter are presented.