The scattering matrix of a physical junction of waveguides (38) can
be expressed in terms of the alpha parameters as
Equation (64) can be rewritten as
Whenever possible, it is advisable to set the branch impedances so that for some , and therefore only multiplications are needed. This is achieved when the th waveguide admittance equals the sum of all the other admittances. According to Fettweis' terminology for wave digital filters, the th junction port is called a reflection-free port, and the th branch is said to be adapted to the other branches. Physically, a wave traveling into the junction on a reflection-free port will be fully scattered into the other branches meeting at the junction, with no reflection back along branch .
In time-varying applications, it is also convenient to maintain
scaling such that
so that no
divisions or renormalizations are necessary in the alpha parameters.
This is easily
accomplished by setting the admittance of branch , say, to
(65) |
Since the alpha parameters sum to in the lossless case,
the first element, say, of the vector
can be expressed as
An important advantage provided by the organization of computations (68) and (69) is that they force the junction to be row allpass complementary (see section 5) even under coefficient quantization. The following theorem establishes the connection between allpass complementarity and structural losslessness of the scattering matrix.
(69) |
(72) |
We see that exact losslessness of a physical waveguide junction is assured provided only that the actual alpha parameters are positive and sum precisely to 2 after quantization. The proof extends readily to nonnegative by assigning to any waveguide branch corresponding to a port for which . (Note that corresponds to a branch which contributes no signal to the junction, and a branch with zero admittance can convey no signal power. Such a situation is physically degenerate so that if quantization forces to zero for some , the corresponding branch may be removed from the junction.)
The above theorem is quite simple from a physical point of view: All we require for exact losslessness is that the quantized scattering matrix correspond to some valid lossless scattering matrix. From the physical correspondence (63) between the alpha parameters and the branch wave admittances it is clear that losslessness holds when . For more general passivity, we can add a positive real ``load'' admittance to the sum over above to obtain that scattering passivity holds if and only if the alpha parameters are positive and sum to a value not exceeding .
The above discussion is only concerned with passivity of the scattering matrix itself. The application of the matrix is assumed to be exact. Since rounding of the final outgoing waves is necessary in practice, we add
Since extended intermediate precision is required to ensure passivity, it is of interest to examine the additional bits required.
The outgoing wave variables are computed as , and a single bit is clearly sufficient to provide the needed headroom for a single subtraction in general. That the second headroom bit is necessary is shown by considering the example , , , , , in which case . If is not allowed, then an example is obtained with , , , , for which . For this to exceed , we must have . With or more, we can choose , and with or more, we can take , and the inequality is satisfied. Thus, (b) two extra bits are necessary and sufficient for the computation of each outgoing wave variable .
It is perhaps surprising at first that only one extra bit suffices for the junction pressure computation, no matter how many branches are impinging on the junction. Ordinarily, an inner product of length requires headroom bits. The single headroom bit requirement is a direct result of the alpha parameters being restricted to positive partitions of in the lossless case, or a positive partitioning of a positive number less than in the lossy, passive case.
Since an out-of-range outgoing traveling wave typically must be ``clipped'' in practice (i.e., replaced by if negative and if positive), the two extra carry bits are normally fed along with the next lower bit (the in-range sign bit) to saturation logic which implements clipping as needed.
The computations (68) or (69) can also be
used to implement precisely lossless or passive time-varying
junctions. In this case, the passivity constraints become
A junction of normalized waveguides can be obtained from (68) or (69) by transformer-coupling each branch other than the first with a waveguide having wave admittance . The ideal transformer introduces two additional multiplications for each branch except one. Therefore, the normalized junction for arbitrary impedances can be implemented using multiplications and additions.