On 6 August 2026, the Falling Walls Foundation announced the finalists for the 2026 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year awards. Professor Xingjun Wang from the Center was selected as one of ten finalists in the Engineering & Technology category for his project, “Breaking the Wall of Full-Spectrum Communication.”
Fig.1 Official Falling Walls finalist interview page
Established by the Falling Walls Foundation in Germany, the awards recognise research with the potential to advance science and generate societal impact. In 2026, expert juries selected ten finalists in each of five categories: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering & Technology, Social Sciences & Humanities, and Art & Science. One finalist in each category is selected as the annual winner. In 2025, Jian-Wei Pan and Lu Fang received the awards in Physical Sciences and Engineering & Technology, respectively.
Different wireless frequency bands typically require dedicated transceiver hardware, while the bandwidth mismatch between optical-fibre and wireless links also limits high-speed interconnection. To address these challenges, the shortlisted project aims to establish a unified communication platform using ultrabroadband integrated photonic devices. This platform would enable the same core hardware to support multiple wireless frequency bands and allow high-speed transmission between optical-fibre and wireless links. Pursuing this approach, the Center and its collaborators have published two studies in Nature.
In 2025, the Center collaborated with Professor Cheng Wang of City University of Hong Kong and other researchers to integrate baseband modulation, conversion between wireless and optical signals, and tunable carrier and local oscillator generation on a thin-film lithium niobate chip. An optoelectronic oscillator based on the chip achieved a tuning range of 0.5–115 GHz. The researchers demonstrated end-to-end wireless communication across nine consecutive frequency bands, achieving single-channel data rates of up to 100 Gb/s. They also demonstrated interference avoidance by switching the operating frequency.
Figure 2. Integrated photonic architecture for full-spectrum wireless networks and a photograph of the chip.
Building on this work, the Center collaborated in 2026 with Peng Cheng Laboratory, ShanghaiTech University, the National Information Optoelectronics Innovation Center, and other partners to enable optical-fibre and wireless links to share core devices. The study used thin-film lithium niobate modulators and modified uni-travelling-carrier photodetectors, both with 3-dB bandwidths exceeding 250 GHz. Single-channel transmission rates of 512 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s were achieved over short-reach optical-fibre and terahertz wireless links, respectively. Real-time 8K video transmission was verified individually on each of 86 channels spanning 138–223 GHz, and simultaneous transmission of two video streams was also demonstrated.
Figure 3. Ultrabroadband integrated photonic devices supporting optical-fibre interconnects, wireless relays, and high-density access.
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