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Discussion

We have successfully tested a fully integrated 16-channel autocorrelator complete with on-chip prescalers, HF clock generator and quantizer, which demonstrated basic functionality at clock speeds of up to 11 GHz. The tested chip was imperfect: critical current density was around tex2html_wrap_inline2819 , low-frequency margins were narrow and 3 out of 16 channels were inoperational. In the experiments with the harmonic input signals we observed several minor differences between the theoretical and the experimentally measured autocorrelation functions. The main source of these differences were the digital errors in the delay line, which we expect to be completely eliminated in a better fabrication sample of the same design. Another limiting subsystem in this experiment was the room-temperature interface. A specialized real-time 16-channel autocorrelator data acquisition system is currently being built. In the future we also plan to design an improved version of the input quantizer allowing considerably larger amplitudes of the input signal. But even with all these imperfections, the autocorrelator, being a statistical device, still served its function and demonstrated bandwidth/16 frequency resolution and detection of a harmonic signal with amplitude tex2html_wrap_inline2821 below the gray zone width.



Alexander Rylyakov
Fri May 23 18:57:25 EDT 1997