To enable high-speed long-distance underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) supplementing traditional underwater wireless communication, a low-power 520 nm green laser diode (LD) based UOWC system was proposed and experimentally demonstrated to implement maximal communication capacity of up to 2.70 Gbps data rate over a 34.5 m underwater transmission distance by using non-return-to-zero on-off keying (NRZ-OOK) modulation scheme. Moreover, maximum data rates of up to 4.60 Gbps, 4.20 Gbps, 3.93 Gbps, 3.88 Gbps, and 3.48 Gbps at underwater distances of 2.3 m, 6.9 m, 11.5 m, 16.1 m and 20.7 m were achieved, respectively. The light attenuation coefficient of ~0.44 dB/m was obtained and the beam divergence angle is 0.35°, so the aallowable underwater transmission distance can be estimated to be ~90.7 m at a data rate of 0.15 Gbps with a corresponding received light-output power of −33.01 dBm and a bit-error rate (BER) of 2.0 $\times$10⁻⁶. In addition, when the data rate is up to 1 Gbps, the UOWC distance is predicted to be ~62.7 m for our proposed UOWC system. The achievements we make are suitable for applications requiring high-speed long-distance real-time UOWC.

High-speed underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) was achieved using an 80 μm blue-emitting GaN-based micro-LED. The micro-LED has a peak emission wavelength of ~440 nm and an underwater power attenuation of 1 dB/m in tap water. The −3 dB electrical-to-optical modulation bandwidth of the packaged micro-LED increases with increasing current and saturates at ~160 MHz. At an underwater distance of 0.6 m, 800 Mb/s data rate was achieved with a bit error rate (BER) of 1.3 × 10⁻³, below the forward error correction (FEC) criteria. And we obtained 100 Mb/s data communication speed with a received light output power of −40 dBm and a BER of 1.9 × 10⁻³, suggesting that UOWC with extended distance can be achieved. Through reflecting the light emission beam by mirrors within a water tank, we experimentally demonstrated a 200 Mb/s data rate with a BER of 3.0 × 10⁻⁶ at an underwater distance of 5.4 m.

Organic optoelectronic devices are usually driven by the electric field generated from an electrode potential difference or bias voltage. Although poled ferroelectric domains may produce oriented stray fields, few efforts have been made to utilize them for photocurrent generation in organic devices. Here we show that large net fields caused by incomplete screening during ferroelectric polarization, and which can be ‘restored’ by short voltage pulses, can facilitate exciton dissociation in organic semiconductors. The oriented fields, comparable with that produced by an electrode potential difference (1~10 MV m⁻¹), here are found to be responsible for the photocurrent in our devices. A prototype for an organic photodetector driven by such stray fields is demonstrated. The photoresponsivity, without any optimization, can achieve ~0.1 mA W⁻¹. This study provides a different operation principle for the generation of photocurrent in organic optoelectronic devices. Furthermore, the polarity-tunable photoresponse may lead to new photoresponsive memory devices.

In this review, anomalous transient photocurrent from organic semiconductor devices in response to square-wave light pulses in the literature are discussed; current efforts to utilize these transients are highlighted, such as in transient-type photodetectors and artificial retinas.