Spain, The Netherlands, UK, Poland and USA. The 6G-REFERENCE partners have been very busy during the past few months travelling all over the world to spread our project preliminary research results in several events, meetings and conferences.
At 6G-REFERENCE, we envision a future where urban areas are equipped with sustainable solutions that can cope with the ever-increasing traffic demands and population densification, while providing disruptive capabilities like the materialization of the internet of sense.
With a consortium formed by ten research and industrial partners from eight European countries coordinated by Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), we will develop hardware enablers constituting a reference design of distributed radios for a cell-free joint communication and sensing system operating in FR3 bands.
Keep reading our July 2025 Newsflash to discover where we have been and what we have done during the past six months!
MWC 2025: Showcasing Our Research & Development Progress to SNS JU and European Commission Leaders
6G-REFERENCE couldn’t miss one of the largest, if not the largest, technological event in the world: Mobile World Congress 2025, celebrated from the 3rd to the 6th of March 2025 in Barcelona (Spain). This was our first stop this year.
Leaders across industries, policymakers, founders and tech innovators came together for the future of connectivity. We were present the four days of the event in the booth of our coordinator, Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), located in the stand 210, booth 4, inside the Catalonia Pavilion in Hall Congress Square.
There, we networked with the attendees and were very honored to receive a very special visit on Monday the 3rd, the first day of MWC 2025. Several top-ranked officers from the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) and the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG-CNECT) of the European Commission enjoyed a showcase of cutting-edge Research and Development (R&D) results and proofs-of-concept from 6G-REFERENCE, represented by our coordinator Ignacio Llamas, Senior Researcher at CTTC, who explained how we are pushing the boundaries of 6G and future networks shaping the next generation of connectivity.
Discover more in this article.
Metamaterials UK Conference & Forum 2025: Presenting a 6G-REFERENCE Scientific Poster
Our second stop features Yi Wang, Professor of Microwave Engineering at the University of Birmingham, a 6G-REFERENCE partner, who attended Metamaterials UK Conference & Forum 2025 in Tortworth Court (UK) to present a scientific poster and a demo of a RIS, as a result of the 6G-REFERENCE project research on the 20th of May.
The poster highlighted the recent work on Reconfigurable Metasurfaces under 6G-REREFERENCE, carried out by Yi Wang’s Emerging Device Technology (EDT) research group. The presentation was attended by 120 participants from the UK metamaterial community, besides several high-profile speakers from Europe and USA.
“We demonstrated a novel reconfigurable metasurface enabled by the use of liquid metals and microfluidics with an objective to develop new and alternative tuning mechanism, simply the implementation and lower power consumption.” – Yi Wang
This work will be published in the European Microwave Conference in September 2025. The poster is co-authored by the PhD students Rasoul Fakhteh and Emelia Hayward.
Read more on the 6G-REFERENCE website.
EuCNC & 6G Summit 2025: Disseminating our Preliminary Research Results and Joining Discussions on 6G Topics
A spring-like Poznań was the setting for our third stop of 2025, the EuCNC & 6G Summit, celebrated this year in the Polish city from the 3rd to the 6th of June, under the theme: ‘Towards the 6G World’. A “world” to which we, at 6G-REFERENCE, could not avoid travelling, to introduce our preliminary research results with a poster and a scientific publication presentation, while joining discussions on several 6G-related topics with the stakeholders of our ecosystem.
We spent most of our time at the event in the Poster Booth 2, or PB2, where our coordinator Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunications de Catalunya (CTTC) was located, represented by the researchers Ignacio Llamas and Zabdiel Brito-Brito. Our booth was our little hub to speak about how we are developing integrated circuit and antenna component solutions, including dynamic frequency filtering and modulated radiation, to enable efficient spectrum coexistence schemes, while also deploying practical hardware enablers in terms of low complexity, cost and power consumption that could end up constituting a reference design for future 6G-distributed radios. It was also a meeting point where we could explain our project activities and network with our partners.
CTTC was joined by the University of Twente, represented by our Technical Manager, Eric Klumperink, and Viswesh Ramkumar, Doctoral Student, together with Jessica Carneiro and Laura Argilés, from our partner responsible for our Communication and Dissemination activities, AUSTRALO.
We presented a poster and a scientific article, but you can read this article to discover all the details about them.
IMS 2025: Bringing Our Innovations Overseas
6G-REFERENCE travelled overseas all the way to San Francisco (United States) for the fourth stop of this first half of 2025.
Eric Klumperink, the 6G-REFERENCE Technical Manager and Associate Professor at the University of Twente, delivered a presentation as an invited speaker titled “Highly Linear Time-variant Mixers/Filters: Operation and Analysis”, as part of a workshop organized by IMS and RFIC Technical Program Committee at the 2025 IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS2025), celebrated from the 15th to the 20th of June 2025 in San Francisco.
The workshop in which Professor Klumperink contributed, attended by 30 participants and held on the first day of the symposium, was titled “Designing with time: Linear Periodically Time-Varying (LPTV) Circuit Approaches Enabling Advanced RFIC Applications”. In his presentation, he explained several time-variant techniques which are explored in the 6G-REFERENCE research, namely N-path filters/mixers, Time Modulated Arrays and FIR Filtering exploiting Filtering by Aliasing.
“Time-variant circuit design techniques bring new degrees of freedom to enhance wireless transceiver spatial and frequency selectivity and linearity.” – Eric Klumperink
The University of Birmingham also delivered a presentation that you can find out in this article.
The 6G-REFERENCE Consortium Gathering in Enschede
To Spain, UK, Poland and USA, we have to add one more country: The Netherlands. All our partners went to Enschede, the home of our Technical Manager, the University of Twente. In this occasion, we did not travel to spread our research results in an event, we gathered in person to discuss our half-way report status and demo definitions on the 28th and 29th of April 2025.
Learn more about what we discussed in this news.
The 6G-REFERENCE Interview Series: Meet our Partners!
Ten are the research and industrial partners that form the 6G-REFERENCE consortium. This year, we started our Interview Series to present them to you, so you can understand their involvement and responsibilities in our project. We started publishing the interview of our Technical Manager from the University of Twente, Erick Klumperink, that we invite you to watch here:
But we also interviewed:
- Antonis Sapoutzis, Outreach Manager from AUSTRALO.
- Dominique Morche, Development and Demonstration Partner from CEA-Leti.
- Marc Bauduin, Full Duplex Communications Partner from IMEC.
- Itziar Maestrojuán, Antenna Array Design and Modelling from Anteral.
- Hua Wang, Dynamic Array and Full Duplex Synchronization Partner from ETH Zürich.
- Ignacio Llamas, Coordinator from Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC).
Watch the full 6G-REFERENCE Project Interview Series “Meet our Partners!” on YouTube.
6G-REFERENCE at the SNS JU Journal 2025
One more year, the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) has published their annual journal: the SNS JU Journal 2025, including information about 6G-REFERENCE, as they did last year in the SNS Journal 2024.
In the 2025 issue, you can discover more about the 6G-REFERENCE project research activities, technologies, objectives and demo cases in the pages 148 and 149, as part of the Call 2 Projects, Stream B ‘Wireless Communication Technologies and Signal Processing’, Microelectronics-based solutions for 6G networks.
Download the journal and read it here.
Upcoming events: See you this Autumn!
After this intense period of travelling, we are taking a break during the Summer months, that will end in September, where we will see you at:
- Simposio Nacional de la Unión Científica Internacional de Radio (URSI 2025): 3-5 September, Tarragona (Spain).
- European Microwave Week (EuMW 2025): 21-26 September, Utrecht (The Netherlands).
Meet you there keep accelerating 6G innovation through the 6G-REFERENCE research driving Europe’s leadership in advanced connectivity technologies!
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This newsletter was originally published on LinkedIn.
