U.S. patents available from 1976 to present.
U.S. patent applications available from 2005 to present.

Icon_funbox Bizarre Patents

Patent No. 5823386

Reward Candy Dispenser for Personal Computers

A personal computer peripheral, battery powered reward candy dispenser which immediately presents students with a single candy for each problem completed correctly.

Newsletter  PatentStorm News

Make the Most of Our Site

See this month's Top Inventors and Most Cited Patents.

Stay on top of the latest innovations by subscribing to an RSS feed.

Registered users: Manage your profile.

 

Assignee: British Telecommunications public limited company


Location: Not specified.
No. of patents: 48

1    
NumberTitleIssue Date
4871244Movable member mounting
The mounting of a movable member such as an optical mirror (3) by bridges (4-7) between a pair of supports (1, 2). The support (1, 2) bridges (4-7) and mirror (3) are integrally formed from a silicon substrate. A pair of electrically conductive paths (8, ...
10/03/1989
4869567Optical coupler
An optical coupler device comprises a waveguide structure underlying a first layer of material which has a refractive index higher than the effective refractive index of the waveguide structure and which is capable of supporting propagation modes of a hig...
09/26/1989
4867521Microlens manufacture
A micro-optic lens is formed by making a lens element (20) having a length less than the required lens length. Adhesive (22) is attached to the rear of the lens element and a glass plate (21) attached to the adhesive. An optical fibre (26) is located agai...
09/19/1989
4867522Wavelength sensitive optical devices
An optical device for use as an optical filter or modulator comprises an optical waveguide including a portion having a refractive index that varies with optical intensity and a mechanism for providing and directing at least two coherent waves at that por...
09/19/1989
4864581Semiconductor structures and a method of manufacturing semiconductor structures
A semiconductor structure and methods for making it, for use in opto-electronic devices, employs only MOVPE growth steps. The structure is based on a mesa having substantially non-reentrant sides. An initial semiconductor structure is produced which inclu...
09/05/1989
4864621Method of speech coding
A multipulse excitation signal estimate is followed by chronological adjustment....
09/05/1989
4862496Routing of network traffic
A method and apparatus for routing traffic in a circuit switched network. A call between two nodes interconnected by a direct link is first offered to the direct route, and if that is blocked it is offered to a currently nominated two-link alternative rou...
08/29/1989
4856868Cables comprising optical fibres of halide glass
An optical fibre cable for radiation monitoring, e.g. remote spectroscopy, has the fibres immersed in a water miscible liquid such as ethylene glycol or isopropanol. It has been found that water miscible liquids protect even fluoride fibre against attack ...
08/15/1989
4854658Radiation deflector assembly
A radiation deflector assembly, primarily for deflecting optical radiation, includes three waveguides mounted in V-shaped grooves (2,3,4) of a substrate (1) which are substantially coplanar. A cantilevered beam (6) integral with the substrate (1) is posit...
08/08/1989
4840461Optical switching devices having liquid crystal with splayed molecular orientation
An optical switch, e.g. a blocking switch or a coupler switch, has a liquid crystal control element which, in at least one of its control configurations, has a splayed molecular orientation. In a preferred embodiment the liquid crystal is surrounded by ch...
06/20/1989
4841575Image encoding and synthesis
Visual images of the face of a speaker are processed to extract during a learning sequence a still frame of the image and a set of typical mouth shapes. Encoding of a sequence to be transmitted, recorded etc. is then achieved by matching the changing mout...
06/20/1989
4839898Optical resonating device
An optical fiber laser comprises an optical resonant cavity defined by an optical fiber (1). First and second reflectors (8, 13; 14, 19) are optically coupled with respective ends of the fibre. The first reflector is adapted to reflect radiation at the la...
06/13/1989
4836643Halide fibre with high numerical aperture
A high numerical aperture optical fibre, e.g. for use in remote spectroscopy, has a cladding of a halide glass which contains Hf and a core of a halide glass which contains Pb. Preferably both glasses contain ZrF4, BaF2, LaF3
06/06/1989
4833668Fault detection in a full duplex optical communications system
An optical duplex system may continue to operate after a break in a fibre if light is reflected at the break and received back at the transmitting station, and that station is unable to identify the origin of the data. To prevent this, in a simple 2-chann...
05/23/1989
4831663Digital signal transmission/reception using differential polarization modulation/demondulation
Digital information is modulated onto an optical carrier using differential-polarization encoding, passed through a transmission medium which may produce unpredictable long-term changes in polarization and then demodulated using differential-polarization ...
05/16/1989
4830455Jointing arrangement
Optical fibre joints to an optical fibre submarine cable repeater are made outside the repeater housing in a separate flexibly-connected jointing arrangement. Thus, if repairs are needed, new fibre joints can be made without the need to rethread an entire...
05/16/1989
4830450Optical fibre termination
A termination for an optical fibre includes a planar support block which has an aperture there-through for receiving and accurately locating an optical fibre end. It is constructed out of a plurality of platelets, the aperture being provided by aligned, l...
05/16/1989
4825262Fabry-perot interferometer
A Fabry-Perot interferometer comprises a single crystal silicon substrate (1) with an integrally formed diaphragm (6) supported between walls (2-5). A glass superstrate (14) is mounted adjacent the substrate (1) with a spacer (13) sandwiched therebetween....
04/25/1989
4823296First order digital filter with controlled boost/truncate quantizer
A 1st-order digital filter network has a quantizer (Q) reducing the number of output bits following multiplication (in M3). The quantizer omits insignificant bits, adding one LSB (boosting) or not (truncating) in dependence on the value of the multiplier ...
04/18/1989
4817171Pattern recognition system
A pattern recognition system comprising pattern scanning data input means (1), a dichotomizing device (3), a feature matching device (5), a label assignment circuit (7) and a syntactic decision processing device (9). The label assignment circuit assigns l...
03/28/1989
4810050Optical inverter and logic devices using same with buffer limited electrical interface
An optical logic device comprises a source of substantially constant, incoherent, optical power. Optical signal output means such as a waveguide switch receives the optical power from the source and has two output ports. The waveguide switch is responsive...
03/07/1989
4809256Optical demultiplexer
A method and system for demultiplexing an optical signal having a bit rate in the order of GBit/second. The system comprising optical demultiplexing means including delay units and sampling devices such as optical modulators which are controlled at the Bi...
02/28/1989
4807953Apparatus and method for frequency locking electromagnetic optical signals
A method and apparatus for generating a plurality of electromagnetic signals, primarily optical signals, having linewidths centered on frequencies fixed relatively to a reference frequency. The apparatus comprises a reference frequency signal source such ...
02/28/1989
4809290Opto-electronic directional switch
An opto-electronic switch which shows a good signal rejection ratio between modes is also of particularly small dimensions. The switch comprises a semiconductor laser 1 having four contacts 12, 12', 13, 13' which provide gain guiding under two stripe wind...
02/28/1989
4803727Transmission system
A stereo coding system is described in which 7 kHZ bandwidth sum (L+R) and difference (L-R) signals are converted to digital form (11 and 12). The difference signal is then bandlimited (13) to 2 kHZ and downsampled (14) to 4K samples/sec prior to being en...
02/07/1989
4802727Positioning optical components and waveguides
A method of positioning an optical component such as a laser diode (36) in alignment with an optical waveguide (30) comprises forming an elongate V-shaped groove (29) and a depression (31) in a substrate (28). A laser diode (3) is then mounted in the depr...
02/07/1989
4794607Opto-electronic devices
An optical amplifier takes the form of a semiconductor laser with coatings on its two facets. The coating takes the form of an anti-reflective coating, e.g. an oxide of Y, Gd, Nd, or La, to reduce the reflectivity and a thin interlayer, e.g. Al2
12/27/1988
4792915Non linear adaptive filters
A non-linear adaptive filter is described having a linear filter connected in parallel with a non-linear filter. The linear filter provides fast adaption until it has modelled the linear contribution of each coefficient. Thereafter the non-linear filter c...
12/20/1988
4786915Attenuation of microwave signals
It is sometimes necessary to reduce the power of microwave transmissions, e.g. to avoid overloading a receiver or to reduce a transmitter's potential to cause interference. The invention reduces the power by inserting radiation absorbent material into the...
11/22/1988
4774706Packet handling communications network
A communications network has a packet assembler/disassembler (PAD) 25 accessed from one or more nodes 21. Short delay limits can be met by creating composite packets at the nodes; these carry information for more than one call. Composite packets are trans...
09/27/1988
4750217Optical receivers
An optical receiver has a pre-amplifier stage comprising an FET-FET cascode circuit. For coherent detection, an electrical local oscillator signal is applied to the gate of one of the FETs, the frequency of which is chosen to provide either homodyne demod...
06/07/1988
4748621TDMA/TDM interfacing
An interface for connecting a station using a time division multiplex format to a time division multi-access system comprising (a) a first channel for converting time division multiplexed signals (112) into bursts (119), (b) a duplex channel for re-consti...
05/31/1988
4744619Connecting and aligning optical fibres and waveguides
To make a low loss connection between the core (5) of a single mode optical fibre (1) and a waveguide (2) on a waveguide substrate (3), a support block (4) which straddles the waveguide (2) is mounted on the waveguide substrate (3). The end-face (6) of th...
05/17/1988
4728628Method of making ridge waveguide lasers
A semiconductor device comprises a base semiconductor portion and, thereon, first and second elevated semiconductor portions separated by a channel. The uppermost surface of the first elevated semiconductor portion carries a metal electrical contact layer...
03/01/1988
4718061Communications network having bit-mapped refresh cycle
A network for carrying real-time (RTS) and data services comprises stations (12) on a ring (11). Frames on the ring have a fixed boundary (15) between a real-time portion of the frame and a data portion. A sequence of cycles is initiated by a priority sta...
01/05/1988
4709418Wideband cable network
In an interactive wideband cable network in which several wideband services, such as television or video signals, can be provided simultaneously from a central service position to a remote wideband switch to which several customers are connected, the cent...
11/24/1987
4704611Electronic tracking system for microwave antennas
A directive antenna (for a groundstation or a satellite) has a plurality of discrete receptional states which provide predetermined electronic displacements from boresight of the optimum direction of reception. The direction of the target is obtained by r...
11/03/1987
4696033One-piece telephone hook switch operating mechanism
A switch operating mechanism for use in a telephone instrument (for example, for operating a hook switch) has two arms (4 and 5) for projection from--and independent displacement with respect to--an outer surface of the instrument body (1). The arms (4 an...
09/22/1987
4694451Adaptive digital filter
A digital filter comprises a plurality of delay stages 41 such as shift register stages through which an input x(t) is fed. Each of a plurality of individually addressable random access memories 42 is addressed by the output of one of the delay stages and...
09/15/1987
4686486Active filter having series resonant active filter terminated by parallel resonant active filter
A fourth (or higher) order filter has a series resonant section terminated by a parallel resonant section, both based on frequency dependent negative resistance (FDNR). The FDNR, resistance and capacitance (representing damping) of the series section are ...
08/11/1987
1    
 
Sign InRegister
Username  
Password   
forgot password?