On Thursday July 2, the FutureG Office within the US Department of War announced the award of a $28M contract to Cohere Technologies to develop next-generation sensing and communications capabilities using the Zak-OTFS waveform pioneered by Cohere. The award builds on a proposal by Cohere, Duke and Virginia Tech to the National Science Foundation under the VINES II program.
Last fall the Duke team, based in Rhodes iiD and Pratt ECE and led by Robert Calderbank, and the Virginia Tech team, led by Lingjia Liu the Co-Director of Wireless@Virginia Tech, collaborated with Cohere to develop the first real-time neural receiver for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) with the Zak-OTFS waveform. Their demonstration of live video and a simultaneous radar view of the wireless propagation environment at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) prepared the ground for an award by capturing the imagination of industry and government leaders.
Today, 5G networks are based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) where information is carried by pulses in the frequency domain (tones). The Zak-OTFS carrier waveform is a pulse in the delay-Doppler domain, making it a truly interdisciplinary waveform. This is because the same Heisenberg-Weyl group appears as delay and Doppler shifts in wireless and as position and momentum shifts in physics. The radar waveform proposed by Philip Woodward in 1953 foreshadowed the GKP states discovered 60 years later by Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill.
More information can be found the recent articles from the Communication Press:
• Light Reading – https://www.lightreading.com/6g/us-defense-dept-backs-6g-rival-to-tech-used-by-ericsson-and-nokia
• Mobile World Live – https://www.mobileworldlive.com/5g/cohere-secures-us-deal-for-drone-5g-sensing-tech/
• The Mobile Network – https://the-mobile-network.com/2026/07/cohere-technologies-bags-28m-dow-deal-to-turn-cell-towers-into-drone-spotting-sensors/
