Prof. Erdal Arıkan of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering received the 2026 Eduard Rhein Technology Award for contributions to polar coding and its use in fifth-generation mobile communications (5G). He shares the award with Norbert Stolte and Ido Tal.
The work addresses a central problem in communications engineering: how to design codes that come close to a channel’s theoretical limit, the Shannon capacity, while remaining practical to encode and decode. In 2009, Prof. Arıkan introduced the idea of channel polarization and showed that polar codes can reach this limit with low-complexity encoding and decoding. Stolte, in his 2002 doctoral thesis at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), had earlier studied closely related codes.
Polar codes gained practical importance when they were selected for control and broadcast channel functions in the 3GPP 5G New Radio standard. The award also recognizes Tal, who, with Alexander Vardy, advanced the decoding methods that made polar codes efficient in low-latency applications.
The Eduard Rhein Technology Award, given by the Eduard Rhein Foundation and awarded annually since 1979, will be presented in May 2027 at the Deutsches Museum Flugwerft Schleißheim in Munich.
https://www.itsoc.org/news/2026-eduard-rhein-technology-award-arikan-stolte-and-tal
