Three takes on telecom's troubles

Spectrum asked three IEEE members from the telecommunications sector to comment on the industry's current woes and prospects. Roch Guerin discusses bandwidth as a commodity and how to deal with it. The impact of technological change on telecommunications is enormous and calls for a shift in business models. Technology is making bandwidth a commodity and it should not matter who supplies it. Competition is vital and commodity providers must be decoupled from value providers. Frank Ferrante points out that the Year 2000 crisis resulted in manufacturers being deluged with orders for new upgraded systems. Vast sums were spent to meet the demand in time. However, when Y2K was over, production stayed high and inventories continued to build, while demand effectively stopped overnight. Dazzling new innovations are needed to compel the masses to spend and manufacturers must apply their resources to deliver quickly and efficiently. Jules A. Bellisio discusses the role of engineers in bringing new ideas to the market place. Many engineers have put together ventures for the sole purpose of attracting capital. The underlying technology and business propositions were there solely to lure the unsuspecting. By allowing engineers to use technology simply to cover for a scam, then the profession is also to blame for the current problems.     

Chemische Zusammensetzung und Mikrostruktur polymerabgeleiteter Gläser und Keramiken im System Si–C–O. Teil 2: Charakterisierung der Gefügeausbildung mittels hochauflösender Durchstrahlungselektronenmikroskopie und Feinbereichsbeugung

Chemical Composition and Microstructure of Polymer‐Derived Glasses and Ceramics in the Si–C–O System. Part 2: Characterization of microstructure formation by means of high‐resolution transmission electron microscopy and selected area diffraction Liquid or solid silicone resins represent the economically most interesting class of organic precursors for the pyrolytic production of glass and ceramics materials on silicon basis. As dense, dimensionally stable components can be cost‐effectively achieved by admixing reactive filler powders, chemical composition and microstructure development of the polymer‐derived residues must be exactly known during thermal decomposition. Thus, in the present work, glasses and ceramics produced by pyrolysis of the model precursor polymethylsiloxane at temperatures from 525 to 1550 °C are investigated. In part 1, by means of analytical electron microscopy, the bonding state of silicon was determined on a nanometre scale and the phase separation of the metastable Si–C–O matrix into SiO₂, C and SiC was proved. The in‐situ crystallization could be considerably accelerated by adding fine‐grained powder of inert fillers, such as Al₂O₃ or SiC, which permits effective process control. In part 2, the microstructure is characterized by high‐resolution transmission electron microscopy and selected area diffraction. Turbostratic carbon and cubic β‐SiC precipitate as crystallization products. Theses phases are embedded in an amorphous matrix. Inert fillers reduce the crystallization temperature by several hundred °C. In this case, the polymer‐derived Si–C–O material acts as a binding agent between the powder particles. Reaction layer formation does not occur. On the investigated pyrolysis conditions, no crystallization of SiO₂ was observed.     

The rank and kernel of extended 1-perfect /spl Zopf//sub 4/-linear and additive non-/spl Zopf//sub 4/-linear codes

A binary extended 1-perfect code of length n + 1 = 2/sup t/ is additive if it is a subgroup of /spl Zopf//sub 2//sup /spl alpha// /spl times/ /spl Zopf//sub 4//sup /spl beta//. The punctured code by deleting a /spl Zopf//sub 2/ coordinate (if there is one) gives a perfect additive code. 1-perfect additive codes were completely characterized and by using that characterization we compute the possible parameters /spl alpha/, /spl beta/, rank, and dimension of the kernel for extended 1-perfect additive codes. A very special case is that of extended 1-perfect /spl Zopf//sub 4/-linear codes.     

Parameterisation of slant-Haar transforms

A parameterisation of the slant-Haar transform is presented, which includes an existing version of the slant-Haar transform. An efficient algorithm for the slant-Haar transform is developed and its computational complexity is estimated. The parametric slant-Haar transforms are compared to the Karhunen-Loeve transform. The parametric slant-Haar is shown to perform better than the commonly used slant-Haar and slant-Hadamard transforms for the first-order Markov model and also performs better than the discrete cosine transform for images approximated by the generalised image correlation model     

Evaluation of performance enhancing proxies in internet over satellite

Performance enhancing proxies (PEPs) are widely used to improve the performance of TCP over high delay‐bandwidth product links and links with high error probability. In this paper we analyse the performance of using TCP connection splitting in combination with web caching via traces obtained from a commercial satellite system. We examine the resulting performance gain under different scenarios, including the effect of caching, congestion, random loss and file sizes. We show, via analysing our measurements, that the performance gain from using splitting is highly sensitive to random losses and the number of simultaneous connections, and that such sensitivity is alleviated by caching. On the other hand, the use of a splitting proxy enhances the value of web caching in that cache hits result in much more significant performance improvement over cache misses when TCP splitting is used. We also compare the performance of using different versions of HTTP in such a system. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Failure analysis of a broken tooth

Several days after heart surgery, a patient discovered his upper right canine tooth had broken at the root. Such tooth damage, recognized post-operatively, is usually assumed to be caused by blunt mechanical force from an instrument used by the anesthesiologist during placement of a breathing tube at the start of surgery. In this case, the patient had saved the crown portion of the broken tooth, and it was possible to examine the root fracture characteristics. The curvature and direction of the crack path and natural tooth situation suggested that failure could be described through a cantilever beam model. This was confirmed when a whole extracted sample tooth was embedded and broken by a measured force in a manner consistent with the model. The resulting fracture surface matched that of the patient’s broken canine tooth. However, the high load and force direction necessary to fracture the root was inconsistent with forces applied during the anesthesia procedure. The failure analysis and further investigation indicated tooth clenching on the breathing tube during recovery was the likely cause of fracture. This paper presents an alternate explanation for intubation-related dental injury, demonstrates the practicality of fractographic analysis of biological materials, and introduces a methodology for simulating in vitro tooth settings for mechanical testing.     

A 0.18-/spl mu/m SiGe BiCMOS receiver and transmitter chipset for SONET OC-768 transmission systems

A 43-Gb/s receiver (Rx) and transmitter (Tx) chip set for SONET OC-768 transmission systems is reported. Both ICs are implemented in a 0.18-/spl mu/m SiGe BiCMOS technology featuring 120-GHz f/sub T/ and 100 GHz f/sub max/. The Rx includes a limiting amplifier, a half-rate clock and data recovery unit, a 1:4 demultiplexer, a frequency acquisition aid, and a frequency lock detector. Input sensitivity for a bit-error rate less than 10/sup -9/ is 40 mV and jitter generation better than 230 fs rms. The IC dissipates 2.4 W from a -3.6-V supply voltage. The Tx integrates a half-rate clock multiplier unit with a 4:1 multiplexer. Measured clock jitter generation is better than 170 fs rms. The IC consumes 2.3 W from a -3.6-V supply voltage.     

Explosive chemistry: Simulating the chemistry of energetic materials at extreme conditions

In this article, we review recent atomistic computational techniques to study the electronic structure aspects and chemistry of energetic materials at high-pressure and/or high temperature. While several mechanisms have been proposed for the initial events of energetic materials at high-pressure, we explore the validity of a proposed shear-induced local metallization via molecular bond bending in the insensitive explosive TATB. We study the effect of high-stress (both uniform and uniaxial) on the electronic energy band-gap and the first chemical event of a prototypical energetic material, that of nitromethane. We also determine chemical reactions rate laws and decomposition mechanisms from a quantum-based molecular dynamics simulation of HMX, a widely used explosive material, at conditions of high density and temperature similar to that encounter under detonation. Finally, we review a new multi-scale computational tool recently developed to model the shock-induced chemistry of energetic materials at the atomistic level, and report its applicability to shocked solid nitromethane. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.