In July 1974, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lawson accepts an assignment in Thailand to fill a career development objective and recover from five grueling years of developing sophisticated computer systems for the Air Force. He also wishes to get over a failed marriage and renew his love affair with the C-130, the aircraft he flew in combat in Vietnam. But most importantly, he wants to relax, enjoy himself, and become immersed in the Thai culture. Lawson is well along in satisfying these objectives when he is asked to fly to Saigon to assist the United States Embassy's Defense Attache...

In the past 10 years extensive effort has been dedicated to commercial wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. Despite all these efforts, however, none of the existing systems has been successful, mainly due to their low data rates. The increasing demand for WLAN systems that can support data rates in excess of 20 Mb/s enticed the FCC to create an unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) band at 5 GHz. This frequency band provides 300 MHz of spectrum in two segments: a 200 MHz(5.15-5.35 GHz) and a 100 MHz (5.725-5.825 GHz) frequency band. This newly released spectrum, and...

It is hardly a revelation to note that wireless and mobile communications have grown tremendously during the last few years. This growth has placed stringent requi- ments on channel spacing and, by implication, on the phase noise of oscillators. C- pounding the challenge has been a recent drive toward implementations of transceivers in CMOS, whose inferior 1/f noise performance has usually been thought to disqualify it from use in all but the lowest-performance oscillators. Low noise oscillators are also highly desired in the digital world, of course. The c- tinued drive toward higher clock...

It is hardly a profound observation to note that we remain in the midst of a wireless revolution. In 1998 alone, over 150 million cell phones were sold worldwide, representing an astonishing 50% increase over the previous year. Maintaining such a remarkable growth rate requires constant innovation to decrease cost while increasing performance and functionality. Traditionally, wireless products have depended on a mixture of semicond- tor technologies, spanning GaAs, bipolar and BiCMOS, just to name a few. A question that has been hotly debated is whether CMOS could ever be suitable for RF...

Improving the performance of the power amplifier is the most pressing problem facing designers of modern radio-frequency (RF) transceivers. Linearity and power efficiency of the transmit path are of utmost importance, and the power amplifier has proven to be the bottleneck for both. High linearity enables transmission at the highest data rates for a given channel bandwidth, and power efficiency prolongs battery lifetime in portable units and reduces heat dissipation in high-power transmitters. Cartesian feedback is a power amplifier linearization technique that acts to soften the tradeoff...

The historical novel Final Curtain: Saigon is the compelling story of the last days of the Vietnam War and the classified dealings that go on behind the cipher-locked doors of the Pentagon and CIA.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, five Vietnam veterans gather for a reunion. While reminiscing about the dangerous final days of the nation's longest and most costly war, the five agree on one point. Once again, the nation has plunged into an unwarranted conflict in the Middle East-and for the same greedy reasons. Now, the veterans just need to figure out a way to stop it. Still bitter over the needless human casualties and loss of wealth in Southeast Asia, the five former covert operatives rename themselves the "phantom patriots" and begin formulating a strategy to...

The motivation for this book was the recognition by two of us (RL and TL) that, despite our training as cardiologists, we had a limited understand ing of many aspects of the surgical management of our patients. Conversa tions with other cardiologists at our own institution and at other medical centers around the country convinced us that many of our colleagues shared our uncertainty about the details of surgical procedures and the factors that determine decisions in the perioperative period. As surgical techniques continue to evolve, this knowledge gap can become only more severe. We...

It is hardly a revelation to note that wireless and mobile communications have grown tremendously during the last few years. This growth has placed stringent requi- ments on channel spacing and, by implication, on the phase noise of oscillators. C- pounding the challenge has been a recent drive toward implementations of transceivers in CMOS, whose inferior 1/f noise performance has usually been thought to disqualify it from use in all but the lowest-performance oscillators. Low noise oscillators are also highly desired in the digital world, of course. The c- tinued drive toward higher clock...