Patent ID: 6957124

Claim:
An element handling system, comprising: an element holding apparatus having a plurality of movable elements stored therein; a system manager configured to encode a signal with control data and to combine the encoded signal with a power signal thereby forming a combined power and control signal, the system manager further configured to transmit the combined power and control signal; an element retrieval device configured to retrieve and transport at least one of the movable elements based on the control data, wherein the element retrieval device comprises a picker configured to remove at least one movable element from the element holding apparatus based on a portion of the control data; a first decoder coupled to the element retrieval device, the first decoder configured to filter the combined vower and control signal thereby recovering the encoded signal, the first decoder further configured to decode the recovered signal thereby recovering the control data; and a second decoder coupled to the picker, the second decoder configured to receive the combined power and control signal and to filter the combined power and control signal thereby recovering the encoded signal, the second decoder configured to decode the recovered signal thereby recovering the control data.