the same time as providing internet communications and the overall room lighting

But rather than developing Li-Fi LEDs around 1mm2 in size, which other researchers around the world are concentrating on, the EPSRC-funded team is developing tiny, micron-sized LEDs which potentially offers a number of major advantages:

Firstly, the tiny LEDs are able to flicker on and off 1,000 times quicker than the larger LEDs this also means they can transmit data more quickly. Secondly, 1,000 micron-sized LEDs would fit into the space occupied by a single larger 1mm2 LED, with each of these tiny LEDs acting as a separate communication channel. A 1mm2 sized array of micron-sized LED high bay light could therefore communicate 1,000 x 1,000 (-i.e. a million) times as much information as one 1mm2 LED.

Moreover, each micron-sized LED would act as a tiny pixel. So one large LED array display (e.g. used to light a living room, a meeting room or the interior of an aircraft), could also be used as a screen displaying information at exactly the same time as providing internet communications and the overall room lighting.

Professor Martin Dawson of the University of Strathclyde, who is leading the initiative, says: "Imagine an LED array beside a motorway helping to light the road, displaying the latest traffic updates and transmitting internet information wirelessly to passengers' laptops, netbooks and smartphones. This is the kind of extraordinary, energy-saving parallelism that we believe our pioneering technology could deliver."