%%-----------Acknowledgements---------------
\phantomsection\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Acknowledgments}
\chapter*{Acknowledgements}

\doublespacing
\parindent 3em % Set the paragraph indentation size
I would like to thank my supervisors Brent Petersen and Mary Kaye for their generous support and guidance throughout my research work.

I would like to thank the ECE technical staff for their help with various technical issues throughout the course of the project. Specifically, I would like to thank Bruce Miller for his routing of my seemingly never ending supply of circuit boards, Blair Allen for his technical assistance as well as creation of many purchase orders, and Kevin Hanscom for his selfless loaning of equipment and his technical assistance with coaxial cable connectorization. Special thanks to Troy Lavigne, who on numerous occasions provided excellent support and knowledge of FPGA technology and software as well as debugging ideas.

I would like to thank Ian Veach for his technical expertise and support in the electronics area and the development of various interface boards, Peter Jacobs for his guidance in the area of cabling and RS-232 communications, and Denise Burke, Karen Annett, and Shelley Cormier from the ECE office for their kindness and support.

My thanks also go out to the staff at LyrTech for their support and their selfless loan of a SignalMaster system for my evaluation.

This research was supported by the Atlantic Innovation Fund from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, and by Aliant, our industrial partner. In particular, I would like to thank David M. Brown from Aliant for all his support. We thank CMC Microsystems for providing the FPGA software development tools via their System-on-Chip Research Network Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant.




