InterDigital noted that the financing for these 6G research initiatives comes from the European Union
U.S.-based firm InterDigital announced that it has been awarded funding to support five Horizon Europe 6G Flagship research projects.
Specifically, the five flagship projects include 6G-XR, CENTRIC, PREDICT-6G, 6G-BRICKS, and 6G-SHINE, which aim to enable technology advancement and experimental infrastructures for future 6G systems.
InterDigital noted that these recently awarded flagship projects are part of a portfolio of 35 research, innovation, and trial projects curated by the EU’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) to enable the evolution of 5G ecosystems and promote 6G research in Europe.
Jointly led by the European Commission and 6G-IA industry association, the SNS JU is responsible for fostering European leadership and technology sovereignty in 6G while boosting 5G deployment across the European continent. The program has allocated 250 million euros ($250 million) to fund the portfolio of 6G flagship projects.
“We are honored to be awarded five Horizon Europe 6G flagship projects to help shape the 6G vision. Being selected for each of these unique projects will enable us to leverage our research heritage and expertise that will shape 6G development in Europe through the future,” said InterDigital’s CTO Rajesh Pankaj. “A competitive research environment helps drive our industry forward by pushing the limits of what is possible in the wireless technology landscape. These awards demonstrate InterDigital’s continuous contributions to the European wireless research and innovation ecosystem, as we build upon a strong record of engagement in the Horizon 2020 5G public-private partnership program.”
The projects awarded to InterDigital are aimed at exploring novel technologies and system architectures to be adopted in commercial networks in the medium or long term, as well as developing EU-wide experimentation platforms that can serve as a sandbox to validate technical 6G enablers.
The CENTRIC project targets the development of radio access technologies towards fulfilling the ultimate vision of a 6G user centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) native air interface.
Meanwhile, the PREDICT-6G project focuses on laying the foundations of an AI-powered digital twin framework to predict the behavior of the end-to-end 6G network and using this framework to enhance the reliability and time sensitivity of the network.
The company also explained that the 6G-SHINE project focuses on the design of short-range communication protocols that can meet the extreme bandwidth, latency and energy requirements emerging for 6G, while the 6G-XR project targets the development of an experimental research infrastructure to evaluate and validate the performance of key 6G candidate technologies, components, and architectures, with focus on enabling next generation Extended Reality (XR) services.
Finally, the 6G-BRICKS project focuses on setting up an experimental research facility to evaluate two key 6G candidate technologies, namely Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) and cell-free massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO).
Horizon Europe is the EU’s most significant investment initiative in European research and innovation; its total budget is 95.5 billion euros.
