EE 390 Assignment #1

Due date: You should work through your own solutions to these problems before
January 19th , when the solutions will be posted.

1. Lathi Problem 2.1-1 (p. 62)

2. Lathi Problem 2.1-3
3. Lathi Problem 2.1-6
Advice: These first three problems all involve calculations of energy or power. In many
cases you can ease the actual calculation workload by first inspecting the waveform and
reasoning about power-related phenomena. For instance we know a phase shift cannot
affect power, and that power arises equally from either positive or negative voltage. Also
note that if a pulse is repeated in time then the Power = (pulse energy) x (pulse repetition
rate) i.e., joules x 1/sec = watts.

4. (a) Explain the difference between channel capacity and channel bandwidth.
(b) When a technical writer in a trade magazine says “the bandwidth of an Ethernet
link is 100 Mb/s” what mistake are they strictly making?
(c) Is it technically possible to transmit 10 Mb/s through a channel that is bandlimited
to 1 MHz? (Answer Yes/No with only brief explanation).
(d) A particular digital subscriber loop modem can achieve 70% of the Shannon limit.
If we transmit +23 dBm into a copper pair subscriber “loop” having 3 Mhz of
bandwidth and 40 db of attenuation, then what is the maximum noise power
(watts) that we can tolerate in the receiver and still provide the user with 6 Mb/s
(according to the Shannon theory)?

5. At a certain wavelength on optical fiber, the loss may be as low as 0.15 dB/km. If the
laser transmitter launches +1 dBm (optical power) into the fiber core:
(a) At what distance would the power level in the fiber fall to 100 nW (nanowatt)?
(b) At what distance would this occur if there are also fiber splices of 0.1 dB loss
every 5 km? (with the first splice 5 km out from the transmitter).
(c) Assume a 200 km link with optical fiber attenuation plus splice losses as above. If
an optical amplifier of 25 dB gain and peak output power of –3 dBm is available,
what is the least distance along the line from the transmitter where the amplifier
could be placed? In this case what is the optical power level at the receiver?
(d) If a practical amplifier not only applies gain, but also adds some noise to the
signal can you think of why in practice we usually want to apply the amplifier
gain at the first opportunity, not later? (Even though the overall sum of gains and
losses between transmitter and receiver is the same either way, think what
happens to the SNR if we put all the required amplification in the link just before
the receiver.)
6. To record “CD quality” audio we sample the signal after bandlimiting it to ~20 kHz,
then quantize its voltage samples into the nearest of 65,536 discrete levels each
represented by a binary word.
(a) What is the minimum encoded bit rate (assuming binary transmission), fb? Hint:
Recall the “sampling theorem” so far only just stated as an important result in the
class notes.
(b) Assuming we can transmit fb bits/sec in fb/2 Hz of bandwidth (a later result which
we see), how many times more bandwidth do I require for the digital signal
compared to the original audio signal? Nonetheless what are some of the
advantages and reasons we would pursue such digitization?
(e) If the 65,536 discrete levels for binary encoding are allocated uniformly to +/- 5
volts peak range, then what is the largest absolute encoding error on any one
sample? (i.e., the largest voltage difference between a sample and its quantized
representation.)

7. A line-driver circuit will be used to implement a multi-amplitude transmission system

with 16 possible transmit symbol levels, as illustrated in Lathi Fig. 1.5 and discussed
on p.6. The line-driver circuit has the following specifications:
(i) maximum average power: 10 dBm (into 50 Ω),
(ii) maximum instantaneous peak power: 30 dBm (into 50 Ω),
(iii) maximum clock speed = 12 M symbols/sec
(a) If all 16 transmission levels are equally likely to be used (and each pulse fills its
time slot fully), then what is the largest voltage spacing between transmit levels that
can be used? Hint: (b) Is the largest voltage spacing limited by the peak or by the
average power limit of the line driver?
(c) What overall bit rate of transmission is achieved? Does the average power depend
on the bit rate in the system?
Note: A “symbol” refers to each of the 16-amplitude pulses available for transmission
(as distinct from a single bit of information being transmitted).

Solutions will be posted Monday January 19th and tutorial sessions offered that
week.