In a DC 50 V/5 A circuit, the relationship between the number of breaking arcs and the spatial distribution of the spectral intensity of breaking arcs of long duration near the cathode in palladium contact were examined through substitution of the contact surfaces of three different shapes: flat and spherical (1 mm radius and 2 mm radius). Findings show the distribution of spectral intensity in Pd arcs to be influenced remarkably by the shape of contact surface and the number of breaking arcs. However, the temperature of Pd arcs was affected neither by the shape of contact surface nor by the number of breaking arcs. The metal-vapor quantity present differed for flat and spherical surface contacts; however, it was not affected by the radius of the curved contact surfaces or by the number of breaking arcs. Additionally, the longer the duration of the breaking arc, the more metal-vapor was presented in the beginning of the arc. Furthermore, arc tracks on contact surfaces were observed with microscopes, clarifying that the relationship between the area of the clouded white metal on the cathode and the shape of contact surface is the same as the relationship between the existent area of measured spectra and the shape of the contact surface.

This paper proposes a frequency diversity transmission scheme that obtains a frequency diversity gain and does not degrade spectrum efficiency; it utilizes multiple carrier frequencies alternately, not simultaneously. This scheme improves the bit error rate (BER) of significant information bits by sacrificing that of insignificant bits in fading channels. Simulation results show that the error floor of significant information bits is reduced to less than 1/5 while that of insignificant bits is doubled. They also show that the proposed scheme improves the received 4-bit ADPCM voice signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by approximately 4 dB even when the frequency correlation is 0. 5.

As expert system technology gains wider acceptance in digital system design, the need to build and maintain a large scale knowledge base will assume greater importance. However, how to build a correct and efficient rule base is even a hard part in the knowledge-based system development. In this paper, we develop FARHDL (Frame-And-Rule-based Hardware Description Language) to form a knowledge base. The FARHDL is simple but powerful to specify the hardware requirements and can be directly simulated by PROLOG. Through the knowledge base transformed from FARHDL, a formal method can be developed to design, implement, and validate the digital hardware systems. Furthermore, behavioral properties, anomaly properties, structural properties, and timing properties are applied to analyze the requirements specification. The purposes of those properties are used to detect explicit/implicit incorrect specification clauses and to capture some desired requirements, such as completeness and consistency. Finally, the analysis results can be a useful tool for finding obscure problems in tricky digital system designs and can also aid in the development of formal specifications.

FIR digital filters composed of parallel multiple subfilters are proposed. A binary expression of an input signal is decomposed into multiple shorter words, which drive the subfilters having different length. The output error is evaluated by mean squared and maximum spectra. A fast algorithm is also proposed to determine optimal filter lengths and coefficients of subfilters. Many examples confirm that the proposed filters generate smaller output errors than conventional filters under the condition of specified number of multiplications and additions in filter operations. Further, multiplier and adder structures (MAS) to perform the operations of the proposed filters are also presented. The number of gates used in the proposed MAS and its critical path are estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed MAS is confirmed.

If the fiber dispersion of soliton transmission line is optimized, the amplifiers output power becomes almost constant for different amplifier spacing and pulse width. Numerical simulations indicate the optimal dispersion can be determined, as the ratio of amplifier spacing to dispersion length is about 0. 8 for uniform dispersion line.

We present a finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) method with the perfectly matched layers (PMLs) absorbing boundary condition (ABC) based on the multidimensional wave digital filters (MD-WDFs) for discrete-time modelling of Maxwell's equations and show its effectiveness. First we propose modified forms of the Maxwell's equations in the PMLs and its MD-WDFs' representation by using the current-controlled voltage sources. In order to estimate the lower bound of numerical errors which come from the discretization of the Maxwell's equations, we examine the numerical dispersion relation and show the advantage of the FD-TD method based on the MD-WDFs over the Yee algorithm. Simultaneously, we estimate numerical errors in practical problems as a function of grid cell size and show that the MD-WDFs can obtain highly accurate numerical solutions in comparison with the Yee algorithm. Then we analyze several typical dielectric optical waveguide problems such as the tapered waveguide and the grating filter, and confirm that the FD-TD method based on the MD-WDFs can also treat radiation and reflection phenomena, which commonly done using the Yee algorithm.

Requirements engineering refers to activities of gathering and organizing customer requirements and system specifications, making explicit representations of them, and making sure that they are valid and accounted for during the course of the design lifecycle of software. One very popular software development practice is the incremental development practice. The incremental development refers to practices that allow a program, or similarly specifications, to be developed, validated, and delivered in stages. The incremental practice is characterized by its depth-first process where focuses are given to small parts of the system in sequence to fair amounts of detail. In this paper, we present a development and validation of specifications in such an incremental style using a tool called ASADAL, a comprehensive CASE tool for real-time systems. ASADAL supports incremental and hierarchical refinements of specifications using multiple representational constructs and the evolving incomplete specifications can be formally tested with respect to critical real time properties or be simulated to determine whether the specifications capture the intended system behavior. In particular, we highlight features of ASADAL's specification simulator, called ASADAL/SIM, that plays a critical role in the incremental validation and helps users gain insights into the validity of evolving specifications. Such features include the multiple and mixed level simulation, real-value simulation, presentation and analysis of simulation data, and variety of flexible simulation control schemes. We illustrate the overall process using an example of an incremental specification development of an elevator control system.

Electroabsorption modulators are high speed devices that are rapidly being commercialised and finding applications in a number of areas, particularly in telecommunications. A CW laser diode modulated by an electroabsorption modulator constitutes an extremely stable, robust and simple source of high quality, high repetition rate ultrashort optical pulses. In this paper we describe the capabilities and limitations of such pulse sources, and present nonlinear pulse compression and manipulation techniques that allow one to overcome these limitations. We also present the design of a new class of comb-like dispersion-profiled fibre compressor. Such a compressor is easily fabricated from commercially available fibres and represents a simple yet powerful way of extending the range of pulse durations available. As the electroabsorption modulator is essentially a high speed switch it is also applicable to optical processing problems, and we report the application of such a device to demultiplexing.

The dependence of the output characteristics of a regeneratively and harmonically FM mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser on intracavity dispersion have been investigated by changing the group velocity dispersion (GVD) of the fiber. It is shown that a stable pulse train can be obtained only when the GVD of the cavity is anomalous in the presence of self-phase modulation (SPM). The shortest pulse obtained was 2. 0 ps at a repetition rate of 10 GHz.

We present a collection of new network control protocols for high-speed networks that are geared to overcome some of the important drawbacks of existing protocols, namely (a) the inefficiencies of existing wait-for-reservation type of protocols for multigigabit wide area networks, (b) the implementation difficulties of credit-based flow control schemes, and (c) the packet resequencing problem of deflection-based schemes. Two of the protocols that will be outlined here were designed in the context of the DARPA sponsored Thunder and Lightning project, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which is a continuing research effort to design and build a virtual-circuit switched, ATM-based, fiber optic network operating at link speeds of up to 40 Gb/s (see, for instance). The third protocol was designed in the context of MOST project, which is a project on (almost) all-optical switching supported by DARPA. All protocols achieve lossless transmission, efficient utilization of the capacity, and minimum pre-transmission delay for delay-sensitive traffic.

The development of a far-infrared imaging system based on ultrafast THz time-domain spectroscopy has opened a new field of applications of femtosecond technology. We describe the principle of this new imaging technique and report recent progress to augment the possibilities of "T-ray" imaging. These include sub-wavelength-resolution near-field imaging and three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of a samples refractive index profile.

In this paper we review the stretched-pulse principle and discuss its inherent advantages for ultrashort pulse generation and transmission. An analytic theory of the stretched-pulse fiber laser is presented and shown to be in good agreement with experimental results. An extension of the stretched-pulse theory is applied to both fiber lasers and dispersion-allocated soliton transmission and then compared to numerical results. We also discuss the design and operation of an environmentally stable stretched-pulse fiber laser.

Optimization of InGaAs/InAlAs multiple quantum well structures for high-speed and low-driving modulation, as well as polarization insensitivity and low chirp, was investigated as a function of well thickness and strain magnitude. As a result, very short optical pulses with 4-6 ps was obtained using a low driving-voltage (<2. 0 Vpp) electroabsorption modulator module operating at a 40-GHz large signal modulation. Small chirp operation for low insertion loss (<8 dB from fiber-to-fiber) with prebias was also demonstrated and the product of the pulse width and the spectral width was estimated to be 0. 39 for a 5 ps pulse width that is nearly transform-limited.

This paper describes an MOS current-mode sample-and-hold (S/H) circuit that potentially operates with a sub-1. 5 V supply voltage, 20 MHz clock frequency, and less than 0. 1% linearity. A newly developed voltage-to-current converter suppresses the voltage change at an input terminal and achieves low-voltage operation with superior linearity. Sample switches are differentially placed at the inputs of a differential amplifier so that the feedthrough errors from switches cancel out. The MOS current-mode S/H circuit is designed and simulated using CMOS 0. 6 µm device parameters. Simulation results indicate that an operation with 20 MHz clock frequency, linearity error of less than 0. 1%, and 1 MHz input from a 1. 5 V power supply is achievable.

The effect of sampling-pulse pedestals, generated by pulse compression, on the temporal resolution in electro-optic (EO) sampling is studied both theoretically and experimentally. Analysis is made on how the pedestals degrade a measurement bandwidth and a temporal waveform. Based on the analysis, a practical guideline on the suppression of pedestals is also given. Gain-switched laser diode (LD) pulses adiabatically soliton-compressed using a dispersion decreasing fiber are used to confirm the theoretical results, and are successfully applied to high-temporal-resolution (>100 GHz) EO sampling measurements.

The symbol basis side information generated by Viterbi's ratio threshold test technique is proposed to improve the performance of the asynchronous slow-frequency-hopped multiple access system with BFSK signaling in the frequency non-selective fading channel. By properly setting the ratio threshold to produce erasure decisions for the received symbols, the system performances are optimized. The relationship among the hit symbols in a hop duration is exploited by this symbol basis side information to greatly reduce the packet error probability. This packet error rate improvement can be as large as two order of magnitude, compared with perfect hop basis side information systems.

The reduction of Soliton-soliton interaction to stabilize the soliton pulse propagation in the periodic dispersion-compensated standard fiber system using optical bandpass filter has been investigated by numerical simulation, and experimentally 10 Gbit/s soliton transmission was realized without fine tuning dispersion management over 5700 km, using appropriate optical bandpass filters and polarization scrambler.

The propagation of solitons in a dispersion managed link can be mainly modeled with the evolution of two parameters γ and C, related to the spectral width and the chirp. Steady propagations are shown to be possible if the average dispersion lies in the anomalous domain. With the same conditions, periodical propagations are both theoretically and experimentally demonstrated. With the help of a perturbation theory, the jitter and the signal to noise ratio are theoretically evaluated. The latter is experimentally shown to be the low power limit of terrestrial systems based on non dispersion shifted fiber. Finally, wavelength and power margins of a single channel 20 Gbit/s soliton transmission over 11 amplifier spans of 102 km show that a 400 Gbit/s Wavelength Division Multiplexed transmission could be envisaged over the same distance.

This paper summarizes our recent efforts in modelocking Ti:sapphire lasers with semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs). We present the shortest optical pulses ever generated directly from a laser. The modelocking build-up time (T BU) of 60 µs is, to our knowledge, the shortest reported for a passively modelocked KLM laser to date.

We study nonlinear pulse propagation in an optical transmission system with dispersion compensation. This is particularly important for designing an ultra-fast long-haul communication system in the next generation. There exists a quasi-stationary pulse solution in such a system whose width and chirp are rapidly oscillating with the period of dispersion compensation. This pulse also has several new features such as enhanced power when compared with the soliton case with a uniform dispersion and a deformation from the sech-shape of soliton. We use the averaging method, and the averaged equation to describe the core of the pulse solution is shown to be the nonlinear Schrodinger equation having a nontrapping quadratic potential. Because of this potential, a pulse propagating in such a system eventually decays into dispersive waves in a way similar to the tunneling effect. However in a practical situation, the tunneling effect is estimated to be small, and the decay may be neglected.