High-Speed Visible Light Communication Using Phenothiazine/Dimesitylborane Derivatives as Color Conversion Materials in Semipolar Micro-LED-Based White-Light Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a cutting-edge high-speed communication technology, poised to meet the surging capacity demands of 6G networks. Micro-light-emitting diodes (μLEDs) are considered as the light sources for achieving high-speed VLC, distinguished by their remarkable modulation bandwidths. However, achieving broadband white light emission hinges on the utilization of color-conversion materials with wide emission spectra. The transmission speed of the white-light system is inherently constrained by the characteristics of these color-conversion materials. In this work, we demonstrate CC-MP7 and CC-MP8, two derivatives of phenothiazine/dimesitylborane, as color conversion materials in a semipolar (20–21) micro-LED-based white-light system for high-speed VLC. The color conversion layers possess wide emission spectra, enabling them to achieve excellent color rendering performance when combined with blue micro-LEDs. CC-MP7 and CC-MP8 demonstrate rapid photoluminescence decay characteristics, thereby enhancing the modulation bandwidth of the color-conversion layer in the white-light system. The resulting bandwidths achieved by CC-MP7 and CC-MP8 are 210 and 240 MHz, respectively, which represents an approximately 45-fold increase compared to ordinary phosphors. By combining semipolar (20–21) micro-LEDs with CC-MP7 and CC-MP8, the resulting white-light systems exhibit correlated color temperatures of 6860 and 7500 K, CIE coordinates of (0.3009, 0.3577) and (0.2958, 0.3129), and color-rendering indexes of 80 and 85, respectively. Furthermore, both systems offer high bandwidths of 1063 and 1084 MHz with the data rates of 1.72 Gbps and 1.74 Gbps using non-return-to-zero on–off keying (NRZ-OOK) format, respectively, indicating the significant potential of CC-MP7 and CC-MP8 for practical applications in VLC.