ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant Award

May 2023: The IPQ is proud to have received one of the highly competitive ERC Proof-of-Concept (PoC) grant with title „Agile Ultra-Scale Communications Using Optical Arbitrary Waveform Generation and Measurement“ (TeraGEAR). We thank the European Research Council (ERC) for their trust in us and greatly appreciate the cooperation.

ERC PoC grants aim at transferring ground-breaking research results to innovation and industrial exploitation. Funding is made available only to researchers who have already received an ERC grant.

TeraGEAR aims at exploring and verifying the commercial potential of a novel class of optical signal processing systems that allow for fully software-defined generation and detection of ultra-broadband arbitrary optical waveforms. Such schemes might be of transformative impact on ultra-scale optical networks that build the base of many technical, economical and societal megatrends such as cloud-based service delivery, the Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0 paradigms, fifth- and sixth-generation networks (5G/6G), or the widespread exploitation of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). On a technical level, TeraGEAR builds upon novel schemes for optical arbitrary waveform generation (OAWG) and optical arbitrary waveform measurement (OAWM) that can address two key challenges of optical communications: The testing and characterization of high-speed optical transceivers with symbol rates expected to approach or even exceed 200 GBd, and the agility of optical communication networks and of the underlying transceivers in dynamically assigning and efficiently using physical-layer resources.