Monthly Archives: October 2010

A Product Cost Reduction Example

Introduction Maintaining good product margins is crucial to maintaining a healthy business. In the electronics business, customers have come to expect prices to drop every year. This means that I need to incorporate frequent cost reductions just to maintain margins. … Continue reading

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Magic Number Analysis – Converting Spectral Width to Sigma

Introduction Engineering seems to have a lot of "magic numbers" – numbers used in equations with no explanations of where they come from. I REALLY do not like magic numbers because years from now some other engineer will be staring … Continue reading

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Solar Eclipse Math

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching the Wonders of the Solar System with Brian Cox on the Science channel.In this episode, he was talking about the Moon and solar eclipses. He made a comment that the region of totality (i.e. complete darkness) during a solar eclipse is only a few hundred kilometers across. To illustrate this point, I found a great picture (Figure 1) taken from the Mir space station of the moon's shadow on the Earth. Continue reading

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Dispersion Power Penalty Modeling (Part 3)

Deriving Equation 2 Equation 2 is derived from Equation 7 by noting the following items. A true normal pulse has infinite length, so we cannot have a high speed data system that sends true normal pulses. A common choice is … Continue reading

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Dispersion Power Penalty Modeling (Part 2)

Modeling Pulse Distortion Choice of Pulse Basis Function As with most modeling problems, it is very important to choose a function that accurately represents your physical signal. The most commonly used pulse models in optics are based on the normal … Continue reading

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Dispersion Power Penalty Modeling (Part 1)

An Apology This blog post is rather long (3 parts). I have had so many questions on this topic lately that I thought I should put some of the notes into a more formal format. The discussion is very specific … Continue reading

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