Organic visible light communications: Recent progress

The field of organic visible light communications is rapidly gaining interest in the research community as a standalone technology in optical wireless communications. Organic small molecule and polymer photonic devices are the focus of wide ranging research due to fascinating characteristics such as mechanical flexibility and extremely low cost solution based processing. On the other hand, charge transport mobility in organic semiconductors is orders of magnitude lower than in inorganics, resulting in corresponding bandwidth limitations and generating a major challenge for increasing transmission speeds. Recently, however, data rates have been demonstrated at Ethernet speeds (10 Mb/s) for the first time. In order to reach such transmission speeds we reported several substantial steps of progress in the literature which will be reviewed in this work.