Pulse sharpening in a uniform LC ladder network containing nonlinear ferroelectric capacitors

The authors describe a method of pulse sharpening in which nonlinear ferroelectric capacitors are used as the nonlinear elements in an LC ladder network instead of saturating inductors. The ladder described is uniform, i.e., each section is identical and comprises a nonlinear capacitor and an air-cored inductor. The ladder is in the form of a simple low-pass filter and acts, at low potentials, as a lumped element delay line in which the delay depends on the number of sections in the ladder and the √LC delay time of each section. Pulse sharpening is caused by the amplitude dependence of the phase velocity of signals propagating along the ladder