Cohere Technologies unveiled Pulsone Technology, a new business unit set to develop wireless solutions for Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) and next-generation networks.

Central to the new unit’s offering is Zak-OTFS, an alternative waveform to Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which is currently used in most mobile communications systems.

The vendor contends its new business will champion the configurable waveform, describing it as “a generalization of all existing 3GPP waveforms” with “the ability to evolve into a flexible ‘mother of waveforms’ for 6G.”

“The wireless industry is at a critical juncture as 5G continues to evolve, but new use cases demand performance and functions that are beyond the capabilities of a standard that’s based on a twenty-five-year-old technology,” said Ray Dolan, Cohere’s chairman and CEO.

The company said it has been working on OTFS-based systems since 2011. In recent years, its efforts have seen the waveform reworked to better handle complex Delay-Doppler channel environments at high speeds, making it suitable to handle defense deployments.

Beyond the battlefield, Cohere Technologies touts its Zak-OTFS waveform for enterprise applications. Its new Pulsone unit will work on bringing the technology to settings like factories, warehouses, and smart cities, supporting automation use cases for applications such as predictive maintenance.

The first showcase of Pulsone’s technology will be on display at Nvidia’s upcoming GTC government event in Washington, D.C., as part of a neural receiver. Developed in collaboration with Duke University and Virginia Tech, a neural receiver is a communication receiver that uses a specially trained neural network that’s capable of decoding incoming signals. Effectively, it employs an underlying AI model to better perform tasks like channel estimation compared to traditional signal processing methods.

“Pulsone Technology allows mobile network operators (MNOs) to use existing 5G hardware initially and transition to enhanced 6G performance through parameter tuning, enabling Pulsone to work with 5G without immediate hardware upgrades – thus giving customers the flexibility for waveform evolution from 5G to 6G based on network and device readiness,” the vendor said in a statement.

Cohere said it has already introduced Zak-OTFS to wireless standards bodies. The company spearheads one such industry group, the Multi-G Initiative, which is working to open up the radio access network (RAN) down to the layer-one (L1) silicon stack.