Digital VHF-electronics for a broadband communication system

With the improvement of lasers and optical fibres increasing transmission rates become available for communication systems, providing digital transmission of data, speech and video signals. A service-integrated, digital broadband communication system with fibre optics and transmission rates of up to 560 Mbit/s is going to be implemented at the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. The handling of such high data rates implies special designed high-speed (VHF-) digital hardware. Propagation velocity and propagation delay, termination, reflections and crosstalk are some of the primarily analog problems which arise for the digital design engineer. By means of two VHF-components, the central clock and time-division multiplex (TDM) frame generator, which is a hardwired, highly reliable equipment, and a microprogrammable TDM-frame converter for TDM frame adaptation between different hierarchical levels, the various problems and their solutions will be discussed.