Generation of electrical short pulse using Schottky line periodically loaded with electronic switches

Abstract

A method of the generation of an electrical short pulse, which uses the Schottky line periodically loaded with electronic switches as a key device, is proposed. As is well known, the Schottky line, which means a transmission line periodically loaded with Schottky diodes, simulates the Toda lattice. When a pulse with the longer temporal duration than the inverse of the Bragg frequency of the line is inputted, it is split to be several solitons. Moreover, these solitons have in general shorter temporal duration than the input pulse. We consider the case in which an electronic switch (the switch is open for voltages greater than some fixed threshold, and closed otherwise) is put in parallel with each Schottky diode. Once the input pulse crosses the threshold voltage of the shunt switches, this multiple solitons are all attenuated at the voltages below the threshold by the finite conductance. However, it is found that the larger solitons are less attenuated than the smaller ones. Thus, it is possible to obtain only the largest soliton among the multiple ones, when we obtain the output after the appropriate transmission of the pulse on the proposed nonlinear transmission line. In this paper, we describe the principle of the operation of the proposed method and quantify how well the method succeeds in the generation of short pulses through both the perturbative characterization and the numerical integration of the transmission equation of the line.