Reflection Free Port

It is useful in practice, such as when connecting two adaptors together, to make one port reflection free. A reflection free port is defined to have a zero reflection coefficient. For port of a parallel adaptor to be reflection free, we must have, from Eq.(Q.25),

Thus, the port's impedance must equal the parallel combination of the other port impedances at the junction. In this case, the junction as a whole ``perfectly terminates'' the reflection free port, so no reflections come back from it.

Connecting two adaptors at a reflection-free port prevents the formation of a delay-free loop which would otherwise occur [136]. As a result, multi-port junctions can be joined without having to insert unit elements (see §Q.1.7) to avoid creating delay-free loops. Only one of the two ports participating in the connection needs to be reflection free.

We can always make a reflection-free port at the connection of two adaptors because the ports used for this connection (one on each adaptor) were created only for purposes of this connection. They can be set to any impedance, and only one of them needs to be reflection free.

To interconnect three adaptors, labeled , , and , we may proceed as follows: Let be augmented with two unconstrained ports, having impedances and . Add a reflection-free port to , and suppose its impedance has to be . Add a reflection-free port to , and suppose its impedance has to be . Now set and connect to via the corresponding ports. Similarly, set and connect to accordingly. This adaptor-connection protocol clearly extends to any number of adaptors.

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written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.