A method and apparatus for stretching a pulse, shaping a stretched pulse, and modeling a stretched and/or shaped pulse are disclosed. An etalon has a port, a partially reflective surface, and a fully reflective surface. A base pulse is introduced into the etalon, and a plurality of portions of the base pulse propagating from the etalon are collected. The collected portions are then combined to generate a stretched pulse whose width is proportional to the width of the base pulse. This can be modeled by assigning a transmission factor value to each one of a plurality of taps and a reflection factor value to each one of the taps, excepting only one tap. A transport delay for is assigned to each tap to which a reflection factor value was assigned, wherein the transport delay is proportional to the width of a base pulse.