High-voltage optical power delivery using a light-wave-modulation method

Optical power-delivery systems are applied to distribute electrical power over optical fibers for systems such as remote wireless radio heads. Typically, the electrical voltage at the receiver side is low, around 1.0 V, owing to the use of a long-wavelength carrier. Consequently, we recently proposed a light-wave-modulation method for increasing the received electrical voltage. A 940-nm high-power laser was directly modulated to form a modulated light wave. We also used a small inductor to generate an induced electromotive force from the modulated light wave. We successfully obtained a peak voltage over 18 V using this simple technique.