High CRI RGB Laser Lighting With 11-Gb/s WDM Link Using Off-the-Shelf Phosphor Plate

In this letter, a practical structure enabling both high-speed visible light communication (VLC) and high-quality white-light is presented. The proposed structure directly mixes red-green-blue colors from semiconductor laser diodes (LD) without dichroic mirrors. The three colors are mixed by a thermally stable off-the-shelf phosphor plate. The broad yellow photoluminescence spectrum excited by a portion of blue LD light fills the vacant spectrum, leading to a high color rendering index (CRI). It is experimentally verified that the phosphor plate works as an excellent diffuser even for the green and red channels. Consequently, an incoherent Lambertian source suitable for indoor lighting is created. It is also found that the impact of the broad yellow spectrum on the green and red communication channels is insignificant. A proof-of-concept demonstration shows a 90 CRI (3503 K) white-light delivering 11 Gb/s of wavelength division multiplexing VLC link, using channel adaptive DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.