June 2010

Vodafone Innovation Award 2010 presented to ETH-Professor

Helmut Bölcskei, Professor at the ETH Zurich has received the Vodafone Innovation Award 2010 for inventing an algorithm that makes cell phones faster and far more efficient.

Helmut Bölcskei, Professor at the Communication Technology Laboratory at ETH Zurich, has been awarded by Vodafone for his generation of an algorithm that boosts performance and efficiency of smart phones and minicomputers. The algorithm allows for very high rates of data transfer but keeps battery stress to a minimum. Their technology is known as «single tree-search sphere decoding» (STS-SD).

With STS-SD Bölcskei and his colleagues Christoph Studer and Adreas Burg have reached a breakthrough in the design of receivers for highly efficient radio communications systems. Due to the algorithm smartphones will be able to achieve data transfer rates from 0.5 to 1 gigabits per second. Since modern telecommunication systems have high data transfer rates, experts assume that the ETH researchers’ algorithm will hold a key role within all digital receivers in future.

Endowed by the «Vodafone Foundation for Research», the innovation award aims at promoting research and further scientific development in the field of mobile communication by honoring outstanding results and achievements in communication research. The prize carries a value of 25’000 Euro.

www.vodafone.com
www.ethz.ch
www.nari.ee.ethz.ch

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