The exponential demand on global wireless data streaming services is pushing current communication network technologies to their limits. To respond to this demand, future 6G networks will depend on Tbit/sec data rate transmission via easily deployable and energy-efficient wireless links. Current 5G wireless systems, characterized by their small spectral bandwidths and high power electronics are fundamentally limited in terms of achievable data rates vs energy consumption. TeraGreen develops a new disruptive technology path for sustainable and scalable commercial exploitation of the THz spectrum for energy-efficient and Tbit/sec wireless communication links enabled by a unique combination of: • Quasi-optical MIMO antennas where a record number of wide-band data signals are being transmitted in parallel through a point-to-point wireless link with an unpresented low level of radiated energy. • Low-energy consumption and record wideband THz transmitters and receivers, in one of the most advanced silicon process in the world with great commercialization potential. • A novel baseband with zero-crossing modulation enabling energy-efficient wideband communication using 1-bit A/D conversion with temporal oversampling. TeraGreen is expected to reduce the power consumption in future 6G base stations by a factor of at least 1000 in terms of energy per bit, while increasing the aggregated data rates by a factor of at least 10. TeraGreen will perform several wireless link demonstrations to showcase its commercial use for wireless backhaul and fixed wireless access. The partners of TeraGreen form a unique European value chain of scientific and technology leadership in their respective fields. The success of TeraGreen will help Europe to be on the foremost frontier in the evolution of mobile networks towards 6G and beyond.

In urban areas, 6G will need to rely on a sustainable solution to cope with the ever-increasing traffic demands and population densification, while providing disruptive capabilities like the materialization of the internet of sense. The solution envisioned by 6G-REFERENCE consist of ultra-dense cell-free deployments for joint coherent communications and sensing at cm-waves, which balance the benefits of sub-6GHz (e.g. reduced pathloss) and mm-wave (e.g. wide bandwidth) ranges. These systems face five fundamental challenges: (i) the need of accurate synchronization among distributed radio units; (ii) fronthaul data distribution; (iii) integration of sensing capabilities; (iv) low complexity/cost/consumption radios; and (v) coexistence with other services. 6G-REFERENCE will develop integrated circuit and antenna component solutions addressing all of them. It will design frequency/time synchronization circuits and a new continuous synchronization framework based on full-duplex. Indeed, full-duplex enabling solutions will be developed targeting such scheme as well as efficient fronthaul data distribution among cascaded radio units, and for enabling integrated monostatic radar sensing. Besides these, on the sensing domain, 6G-REFERENCE will explore environmental sensors integrated in the antenna estates, reuse the synchronization framework for accurate localization, and develop new array solutions like frequency modulation providing spatial superesolution at a contained cost and power consumption. The latter will be also targeted by time modulated arrays providing efficient single-RF chain multibeam operation as well as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces extending the capabilities of small FMA/TMA arrays. Finally, dynamic IF and antenna filtering will be developed to enable efficient spectrum coexistence schemes. The ultimate goal of 6G-REFERENCE is to develop hardware enablers that could end up constituting a reference design of future 6G distributed radios.

TThe 6GTandem project will demonstrate ultra-high-capacity coverage, off-load of lower frequency bands and new services such as sub-cm resolution sensing and positioning in high traffic areas by adding sub-THz carriers to lower frequency bands in a seamless, tightly coordinated fashion. The two frequency bands will form a network collaborating and supporting each other in a “tandem” configuration enabling an introduction of high capacity, energy efficient, sub-THz enabled services, while mitigating known drawbacks of the sub-THz frequency bands such as susceptibility to line-of-sight blockage, coverage, and cost. Deployment will be addressed through the introduction of a thin and light dielectric waveguide to distribute a sub-THz RF signal through a daisy chain of integrated low-power antenna units, referred to as a “radio stripe”. We will demonstrate the use of lower, sub-10 GHz frequency bands to support the sub-THz band with resilience and coverage and the implementation of a distributed MIMO system to extend the coverage of the sub-THz band as well as offering capacities in the order of Tbps system throughput. We will demonstrate the possibility to implement local fronthaul solutions for added sub-10GHz access points using the high bandwidth of sub-THz radio stripes. Key elements for 6GTandem: - A system defining an ‘aligned tandem’ dual-frequency distributed MIMO architecture - Medium-aware waveforms, transmission schemes and communication strategies for energy-efficient operation and development of cross-layer solutions to offer required service levels on the novel dual-frequency infrastructure - Novel, “radio stripe” hardware including transceivers at 130GHz-175GHz, packaging, integration, and plastic waveguide for a low-cost, easy-deployable sub-THz infrastructure - Conception of a combined low-frequency and sub-THz distributed MIMO system supporting joint high-resolution sensing, high-accuracy positioning, and high-resilience and reliability communication.

Our society is on the brink of a new age with the development of new visionary concepts such as internet of things, autonomous driving, and coverage everywhere. This stimulates the use of new deployment concepts, such as Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), to support the wireless communication evolution. For 6G, a key use case which stands unaddressed by prior telecommunication generations, is that of coverage everywhere. A major candidate to solve this issue, is to deploy a network of satellites in an NTN configuration, which is front hauled by a high-gain gateway cell in order to serve rural and remote areas which up until now is lacking coverage. Here, especially novel energy efficient antenna systems are required to track fast moving satellites while meeting the cost targets of the consumer market. One of the major reasons for not addressing this thus far is the lack of expertise about non-terrestrial communication in the classical (terrestrial) telecommunication industry, which underpins the urgent need for a cross-disciplinary industrial doctorate network. ANTERRA establishes a unique and well-structured training network with leading R&D labs from European industries, universities and technology institutes in the domain of antenna systems for terrestrial as well as non-terrestrial applications. The 15 ESRs will form a research team that is embedded in leading industrial and academic R&D labs. The programme will strongly enhance the employability and career prospects of the ESRs by offering a high-quality consortium with in-depth training in the technical areas as well as a comprehensive set of transferable skills relevant for innovation and long-term employability. The ESRs will all spend at least 18 months of their time at industry, ensuring that the training includes a significant industrial experience and application.

In parallel to the current developments in the so-called narrow artificial intelligence (AI) realm, there is an urgent demand for more universal, general AI approaches that can operate across a wider spectrum of application domains with varying data characteristics. It is expected that the emerging sustainable AI methods can be efficiently deployed in the edge-cloud continuum on different hardware platforms and computing infrastructure depending on the real-world task scenarios and constraints including the limited energy budget. In response to this growing demand and emerging trends we propose to adopt a brain-like approach to AI system design due to its promising potential for functional flexibility, hardware friendliness as well as energy efficiency among others. To this end, EXTRA-BRAIN is aimed at developing a new generation of AI solutions based on brain-like neural networks that enable us to overcome key limitations of the current state-of-the-art methods, exemplified by deep learning, such as limited cross-task generalisation and extrapolation to novel domains (bounded reliability), excessive dependence on costly annotated data as well as extensive training and validation processes with heavy demand for compute resources at high energy cost, to name a few. The core brain-like neural network design in our approach derives from the accumulated computational neuroscience insights into the brain's working principles of information processing, key learning schemes and neuroanatomical structures that underlie the brain's perceptual/cognitive phenomena and its functional flexibility. Furthermore, these novel models are supported by data optimisation pipelines, which improve data quality, security and reduce the costs of assembling suitable training data, and an explainability framework to empower the human user. The proposed EXTRA-BRAIN framework will be examined in a diverse set of use cases with different hardware demands in the edge-cloud continuum.