Abstract: A cold cathode lighting system comprising a cold cathode lamp with electrodes on either end of the lamp, oriented such that it includes an electrode extension in order to return the electrode to the same parallel position as the main body of the lamp. The lamp's electrodes are inserted into a casing that is comprised of a casing covers on either ends of the casing which may slid be opened. The casing covers interact with a electrode cover assembly underneath the casing covers, that allows the lamp to be inserted when the casing covers are opened. The closing of the casing covers will safely engage an interconnection with the lamp's electrodes through the electrode cover assembly.

Abstract: A tail-tank coupling technique combines two complementary differential LC-VCOs to form a quadrature LC-VCO. The technique reduces phase noise by providing additional energy storage for noise redistribution and by cancelling noise injected by transistors when they operate in the triode region. The resulting noise factor is close to the theoretical minimum 1+?, similar to a differential LC-VCO driven by an ideal noiseless current source. However, its figure-of-merit is higher, due to the absence of voltage head-room being consumed by a current source. The optimal ratio of tail-tank capacitor to main-tank capacitor for minimizing phase noise is approximately 0.5. The method can be extended to combine any even number of LC tanks resonating at fo and 2fo to form an integrated oscillator producing quadrature phase at frequency fosc and differential output at 2fosc.

Abstract: An improved DDFS includes a minority-bit detector to permit a series of cascaded transformation stages to perform half or less than half of the rotational operations otherwise required by detecting whether the required rotation or non-rotation operations are in the minority and performing only the operations in the minority. This substantially reduces the number of minority-select butterfly stages that would otherwise be required. The cascaded transformation stages include a preliminary set of lookup tables in ROM memory, one of which is selected in accordance with the minority-bit detector and may include a subsequent set of butterfly stages providing the inputs to the minority-select butterfly stages.

Abstract: Electrical contacting surfaces are disclosed having numerous electrically conductive substantially spherical protrusions. These contacting surfaces may be used repeatedly in low voltage applications. The numerous electrically conductive substantially spherical protrusions provide points of high pressure thereby forming multiple parallel electrically conductive pathways across the contacting surfaces to establish good electrical continuity.