Acoustic Delay Line

Analog delay lines are applied in many types of signal processing circuits; for example the PAL television standard uses an analog delay line to store an entire video scanline. Acoustic and electromechanical delay lines are used to provide a "reverberation" effect in musical instrument amplifiers, or to simulate an echo. High-speed oscilloscopes used an analog delay line to allow observation of waveforms just before some triggering event.

acoustic delay line

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In 1938, William Spencer Percival of Electrical & Musical Industries (later EMI) applied for a patent on an acoustical delay line using piezoelectric transducers and a liquid medium. He used water or kerosene, with a 10 MHz carrier frequency, with multiple baffles and reflectors in the delay tank to create a long acoustic path in a relatively small tank.[5]

In 1939, Laurens Hammond applied electromechanical delay lines to the problem of creating artificial reverberation for his Hammond organ.[6] Hammond used coil springs to transmit mechanical waves between voice-coil transducers.

The problem of suppressing multipath interference in television reception motivated Clarence Hansell of RCA to use delay lines in his 1939 patent application. He used "delay cables" for this, relatively short pieces of coaxial cable used as delay lines, but he recognized the possibility of using magnetostrictive or piezoelectric delay lines.[7]

By 1943, compact delay lines with distributed capacitance and inductance were devised. Typical early designs involved winding an enamel insulated wire on an insulating core and then surrounding that with a grounded conductive jacket. Richard Nelson of General Electric filed a patent for such a line that year.[8] Other GE employees, John Rubel and Roy Troell, concluded that the insulated wire could be wound around a conducting core to achieve the same effect.[9] Much of the development of delay lines during World War II was motivated by the problems encountered in radar systems.

In 1944, Madison G. Nicholson applied for a general patent on magnetostrictive delay lines. He recommended their use for applications requiring delays or measurement of intervals in the 10 to 1000 microseconds time range.[10]

In 1945, Gordon D. Forbes and Herbert Shapiro filed a patent for the mercury delay line with piezoelectric transducers.[11] This delay line technology would play an important role, serving as the basis of the delay-line memory used in several first-generation computers.

In 1946, David Arenberg filed patents covering the use of piezoelectric transducers attached to single crystal solid delay lines. He tried using quartz as a delay medium and reported that anisotropy in the quartz crystals caused problems. He reported success with single crystals of lithium bromide, sodium chloride and aluminum.[12][13] Arlenberg developed the idea of complex 2- and 3-dimensional folding of the acoustic path in the solid medium in order to package long delays into a compact crystal.[14] The delay lines used to decode PAL television signals follow the outline of this patent, using quartz glass as a medium instead of a single crystal.

Delay-line memory is a form of computer memory, now obsolete, that was used on some of the earliest digital computers. Like many modern forms of electronic computer memory, delay-line memory was a refreshable memory, but as opposed to modern random-access memory, delay-line memory was sequential-access.

Analog delay line technology had been used since the 1920s to delay the propagation of analog signals. When a delay line is used as a memory device, an amplifier and a pulse shaper are connected between the output of the delay line and the input. These devices recirculate the signals from the output back into the input, creating a loop that maintains the signal as long as power is applied. The shaper ensures the pulses remain well-formed, removing any degradation due to losses in the medium.

The memory capacity is determined by dividing the time taken to transmit one bit into the time it takes for data to circulate through the delay line. Early delay-line memory systems had capacities of a few thousand bits, with recirculation times measured in microseconds. To read or write a particular bit stored in such a memory, it is necessary to wait for that bit to circulate through the delay line into the electronics. The delay to read or write any particular bit is no longer than the recirculation time.

Use of a delay line for a computer memory was invented by J. Presper Eckert in the mid-1940s for use in computers such as the EDVAC and the UNIVAC I. Eckert and John Mauchly applied for a patent for a delay-line memory system on October 31, 1947; the patent was issued in 1953.[1] This patent focused on mercury delay lines, but it also discussed delay lines made of strings of inductors and capacitors, magnetostrictive delay lines, and delay lines built using rotating disks to transfer data to a read head at one point on the circumference from a write head elsewhere around the circumference.

Non-moving objects at a fixed distance from the antenna always return a signal after the same delay. This would appear as a fixed spot on the display, making detection of other targets in the area more difficult. Early radars simply aimed their beams away from the ground to avoid the majority of this "clutter". This was not an ideal situation; it required careful aiming, which was difficult for smaller mobile radars, and did not remove other sources of clutter-like reflections from features like prominent hills, and in the worst case would allow low-flying enemy aircraft to literally fly "under the radar".

To filter out static objects, two pulses were compared, and returns with the same delay times were removed. To do this, the signal sent from the receiver to the display was split in two, with one path leading directly to the display and the second leading to a delay unit. The delay was carefully tuned to be some multiple of the time between pulses, or "pulse repetition frequency". This resulted in the delayed signal from an earlier pulse exiting the delay unit the same time that the signal from a newer pulse was received from the antenna. One of the signals was electrically inverted, typically the one from the delay, and the two signals were then combined and sent to the display. Any signal that was at the same location was nullified by the inverted signal from a previous pulse, leaving only the moving objects on the display.

Several different types of delay systems were invented for this purpose, with one common principle being that the information was stored acoustically in a medium. MIT experimented with a number of systems, including glass, quartz, steel and lead. The Japanese deployed a system consisting of a quartz element with a powdered glass coating that reduced surface waves that interfered with proper reception. The United States Naval Research Laboratory used steel rods wrapped into a helix, but this was useful only for low frequencies under 1 MHz. Raytheon used a magnesium alloy originally developed for making bells.[2]

The first practical de-cluttering system based on the concept was developed by J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. His solution used a column of mercury with piezo crystal transducers (a combination of speaker and microphone) at either end. Signals from the radar amplifier were sent to the transducer at one end of the tube, which would generate a small wave in the mercury. The wave would quickly travel to the far end of the tube, where it would be read back out by the other transducer, inverted, and sent to the display. Careful mechanical arrangement was needed to ensure that the delay time matched the inter-pulse timing of the radar being used.

All of these systems were suitable for conversion into a computer memory. The key was to recycle the signals within the memory system, so they would not disappear after traveling through the delay. This was relatively easy to arrange with simple electronics.

After the war, Eckert turned his attention to computer development, which was a topic of some interest at the time. One problem with practical development was the lack of a suitable memory device, and Eckert's work on the radar delays gave him a major advantage over other researchers in this regard.

For a computer application the timing was still critical, but for a different reason. Conventional computers have a natural "cycle time" needed to complete an operation, the start and end of which typically consist of reading or writing memory. Thus the delay lines had to be timed such that the pulses would arrive at the receiver just as the computer was ready to read it. Typically many pulses would be "in flight" through the delay, and the computer would count the pulses by comparing to a master clock to find the particular bit it was looking for.

Mercury was used because its acoustic impedance is close to that of the piezoelectric quartz crystals; this minimized the energy loss and the echoes when the signal was transmitted from crystal to medium and back again. The high speed of sound in mercury (1450 m/s) meant that the time needed to wait for a pulse to arrive at the receiving end was less than it would have been with a slower medium, such as air (343.2 m/s), but it also meant that the total number of pulses that could be stored in any reasonably sized column of mercury was limited. Other technical drawbacks of mercury included its weight, its cost, and its toxicity. Moreover, to get the acoustic impedances to match as closely as possible, the mercury had to be kept at a constant temperature. The system heated the mercury to a uniform above-room temperature setting of 40 C (104 F), which made servicing the tubes hot and uncomfortable work. (Alan Turing proposed the use of gin as an ultrasonic delay medium, claiming that it had the necessary acoustic properties.[3])

EDSAC, the second full-scale stored-program digital computer, began operation with 256 35-bit words of memory, stored in 16 delay lines holding 560 bits each (words in the delay line were composed from 36 pulses, one pulse was used as a space between consecutive numbers).[4] The memory was later expanded to 512 words by adding a second set of 16 delay lines. In the UNIVAC I the capacity of an individual delay line was smaller, each column stored 120 bits (although the term "bit" was not in popular use at the time), requiring 7 large memory units with 18 columns each to make up a 1000-word store. Combined with their support circuitry and amplifiers, the memory subsystem formed its own walk-in room. The average access time was about 222 microseconds, which was considerably faster than the mechanical systems used on earlier computers. 041b061a72