Prof. Giuseppe Caire is part of the team awarded the prestigious ERC Synergy Grant for the project WePhICom (Waves, Physics, Information, and Computation) — €10 million over six years to develop energy-efficient wireless communication technology.
The team comprises Prof. Caire (TU Berlin), Prof. Andrea Alù (City University of New York), Prof. Marco Di Renzo (CNRS / Université Paris-Saclay), and Prof. Christoph Studer (ETH Zürich). The project explores how electromagnetic waves can be processed more efficiently with metasurfaces, keeping signals as waves longer instead of digitising them at every step. Telecommunications currently account for an estimated 5–10 % of global greenhouse-gas emissions; reducing that footprint motivates the work.
Caire's analogy: "The previous technology examined every piece of hay to find the needle; our technology shines a flashlight in and finds the needle directly."
Source: TU Berlin news article. Photo: © TU Berlin / Felix Noak.