Gallium nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have revolutionized the lighting industry with their efficient generation of blue and green light. While broad-area (square millimetre) devices have become the dominant LED lighting technology, fabricating LEDs into micro-scale pixels (micro-LEDs) yields further advantages for optical wireless communications (OWC), and for the development of smart-lighting applications such as tracking and imaging. The smaller active areas of micro-LEDs result in high current density operation, providing high modulation bandwidths and increased optical power density. Fabricating micro-LEDs in array formats allows device layouts to be tailored for target applications and provides additional degrees of freedom for OWC systems. Temporal and spatial control is crucial to use the full potential of these micro-scale sources, and is achieved by bonding arrays to pitch-matched complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor control electronics. These compact, integrated chips operate as digital-to-light converters, providing optical signals from digital inputs. Applying the devices as projection systems allows structured light patterns to be used for tracking and self-location, while simultaneously providing space-division multiple access communication links. The high-speed nature of micro-LED array devices, combined with spatial and temporal control, allows many modes of operation for OWC providing complex functionality with chip-scale devices. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Optical wireless communication’.

The US Institute of Medicine has encouraged the pursuit and development of potential reduced-exposure products (PREPs) - tobacco products that substantially reduce exposure to one or more tobacco toxicants and can reasonably be expected to reduce the risk of one or more specific diseases or other adverse health effects. One potential approach is to reduce levels of some smoke toxicant precursors, such as proteins and polyphenols, in tobacco. We describe a treatment process involving aqueous tobacco extraction and treatment with protease; filtration of the extract to remove peptides, amino acids and polyphenols, and recombination of extract and treated tobacco. The process reduced levels of protein nitrogen (59%), polyphenols (33-78%) and nicotine (12%) while sugars increased 16%. ISO mainstream smoke yields of 43 toxicants were measured from cigarettes containing treated tobaccos; lower yields of tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide (16-20%), acrylonitrile, ammonia, aromatic amines, pyridine, quinolene and hydrogen cyanide (33-51%), tobacco specific nitrosamines (25-32%); phenolics (24-56%), benzene (16%), toluene (25%) and cadmium (34%) were obtained. There were significantly increased yields of formaldehyde (49%) and isoprene (17%). Reductions in sidestream yields of nitrogenous smoke toxicants and increases in sidestream yields of several carbonyls, benzo(a)pyrene and isoprene were also observed.

Harnessing the full complexity of optical fields requires complete control of all degrees-of-freedom within a region of space and time -an open goal for present-day spatial light modulators (SLMs), active metasurfaces, and optical phased arrays. Here, we solve this challenge with a programmable photonic crystal cavity array enabled by four key advances: (i) near-unity vertical coupling to high-finesse microcavities through inverse design, (ii) scalable fabrication by optimized, 300 mm full-wafer processing, (iii) picometer-precision resonance alignment using automated, closed-loop "holographic trimming", and (iv) out-of-plane cavity control via a high-speed µLED array. Combining each, we demonstrate near-complete spatiotemporal control of a 64-resonator, two-dimensional SLM with nanosecond-and femtojoule-order switching. Simultaneously operating wavelength-scale modes near the space-and time-bandwidth limits, this work opens a new regime of programmability at the fundamental limits of multimode optical control.

We report a CMOS integrated micro-LED array capable of generating discrete optical output power levels. A 16 × 16 array of individually addressable pixels are on-off controlled through parallel logic signals. With carefully selected groups of LEDs driven together, signals suitable for discrete transmission schemes are produced. The linearity of the device is assessed, and data transmission using pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is performed. Error-free transmission at a symbol rate of 100 MSamples/s is demonstrated with 4-PAM, yielding a data rate of 200 Mb/s. For 8-PAM, encoding is required to overcome the baseline wander from the receiver, reducing the data rate to 150 Mb/s. We also present an experimental proof-of-concept demonstration of discrete-level OFDM, achieving a spectral efficiency of 3.96 bits/s/Hz.

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