EEE Faculty member Prof. Dr. Erdal Arıkan has received the 2026 Eduard Rhein Technology Award, together with Dr. Norbert Stolte and Dr. Ido Tal.
The Eduard Rhein Technology Award recognizes outstanding technological achievements with significant impact on society and industry. Prof. Dr. Erdal Arıkan, Dr. Norbert Stolte, and Dr. Ido Tal received the 2026 award in recognition of their contributions to polar coding and its use in fifth-generation mobile communications (5G).
Prof. Arıkan’s groundbreaking work on channel polarization and polar codes has had a profound impact on modern communication theory and practice. Polar codes, introduced by Prof. Arıkan as the first class of codes proven to achieve the capacity of binary-input discrete memoryless channels with low encoding and decoding complexity, have since become an integral part of the 5G New Radio standard.
We congratulate Prof. Dr. Erdal Arıkan on this prestigious recognition and celebrate this remarkable achievement on behalf of the Bilkent University Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Detailed information about the Eduard Rhein Foundation and its awardees can be found at https://www.eduard-rhein-stiftung.de/en/awardees/.