Optical Wireless Communication

Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems

Fraunhofer IPMS has been developing communication components, prototypes, and reference designs in the area of optical wireless components for several years. It is a member of the Infrared Data Association (IrDA®) as well as a leading member of the 10 Giga-IR working group. In addition, Fraunhofer IPMS is a founding member of the Li-Fi consortium – a non-profit interest group for optical wireless communication technologies and solutions. Besides IrDA compliant products, Fraunhofer IPMS has been working on components and systems for wireless communication using visible light (VLC).

IrDA and beyond

The IrDA infrared data communication standard is a simple to use, powerful and competitive wireless data link. It caters to an expanding market of portable as well as stationary devices. The Infrared Data Association standardized the IrDA protocol. Within IrDA, data rates from 9.6 kb/s up to recent 1 Gb/s (Giga-IR) are supported for consumer, industrial and medical applications. A new 10 Giga-IR standard with data rates up to 10 Gb/s as well as new usage models for docking, beaming, HotSpot and broadcasting solutions are under development. Devices with integrated IrDA include notebooks, PDAs, cameras, mobile phones, measuring devices, data loggers, watches, etc.

Available data rates

SIR 9,6 - 115,2 kb/s
MIR 576 kb/s, 1,152 Mb/s
FIR 4 Mb/s
VFIR 16 Mb/s
UFIR 96 Mb/s
Giga-IR 512 Mb/s, 1 Gb/s
10 Giga-IR 5 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s (soon)

Advantages

Compared to other wireless communication standards, IrDA offers numerous advantages. The most important are listed below:

  • High speed data transfer
  • Secure link (line of sight transfer)
  • High reliability (as measured by BER)
  • Low power consumption
  • Small form factor

Products

Fraunhofer IPMS provides IrDA protocol stack IPs, IrDA compliant ICs, and system integration support for all data rates up to 1 Gbps.

Hard IP

  • PHY, Framer and upper layers like IrLAP, IrLMP, …
  • All data rates available (9.6 kbps - 1 Gbps)
  • Half and full duplex capabilities

Soft IP and driver development

  • Pure software stack for microcontroller implementation
  • Upper layers for combination with Hard IP
  • Compatible to most common 8-, 16-, 32-bit processors (8051, MSP430, ARM, XScale, …)
  • Device driver development

IrDA Controller ICs

  • PHY/Framer for data rates from 9.6 kbps - 16 Mbps
  • Optionally use of hard coded IrLAP and IrLMP layers to reduce host controller resources and performance of more than 60%
  • Remote control function

Visible Light Communication (VLC)

  • Full duplex PHY/Framer Hard IP for 100 Mbps
  • VLC compliant protocol stack design

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