Proposed Ring Repeater Design

Orignally published as an Appendix to “A prototype ring interface for the NPS data communication ring”, an NPS Master’s Thesis by Michael James Harris (https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/17193)The Ring Interface discussed in this thesis was designed to connect to a byte parallel host on the one side and a bit serial repeater on the other. The repeater must connect directly to the inbound ring cable, receive the signal, recover clocking information, and pass on reshaped (and possibly retimed) data to the outbound cable. To design the repeater, then, one must know what type of cable is to be used, what transmission distances are required (and consider such effects as "pulse jitter"), what type of driver/receivers are to be used, and what transmission speed is to be used. The repeater was separated from the ring interface so that these questions could be defered until the speed capability of the RI was known, and to further modularize the ring design and allow insertion of a repeater (without RI) in long cable runs