Horizon 2020 Spectrum Prize and Optical Prize open

The submission session for both the Spectrum Prize and the Optical Prize is open. Opening of registration and entry submission was postponed. Deadline for the Spectrum Prize is December 17, 2015 and for the Optical Prize March 15, 2016. The budget for both prizes is € 500,000. The prizes are published under the pillar Industrial Leadership (IL) of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation - Horizon 2020.

The Horizon Prize for Collaborative Saring of Spectrum (H2020-SpectrumPrize-2015) will be awarded to an innovative and disruptive approach which will enable a significant increase in spectrum sharing and re-use, beyond the currently applicable spectrum sharing methods and centralised techniques. The winning solution should be a significant step forward from current technologies and solutions in terms of shared spectrum usage metrics and will have to prove its economic viability. The feasibility of the approach will have to be demonstrated through clear experimental results.

The Horizon Prize for Breaking the Optical Transmission Barriers (H2020-OpticalPrize-2015) will be awarded to a solution that maximises the fibre capacity per channel, spectrum range and/or spectral efficiency and reach. It should also be energy efficient, economically viable, and easy to install and deploy. The solution should have a strong potential to be adopted in future generations of optical-system products. The feasibility of the approach will have to be demonstrated through clear experimental results.