No abstract

High power, broad bandwidth, high linearity, and low noise are among the most important features in amplifier design. The broad-band spatial power-combining technique addresses all these issues by combining the output power of a large quantity of microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) amplifiers in a broad-band coaxial waveguide environment, while maintaining good linearity and improving phase noise of the MMIC amplifiers. A coaxial waveguide was used as the host of the combining circuits for broader bandwidth and better uniformity by equally distributing the input power to each element. A new compact coaxial combiner with much smaller size is investigated. Broad-band slotline to microstrip-line transition is integrated for better compatibility with commercial MMIC amplifiers. Thermal simulations are performed and an improved thermal management scheme over previous designs is employed to improve the heat sinking in high-power application. A high-power amplifier using the compact combiner design is built and demonstrated to have a bandwidth from 6 to 17 GHz with 44-W maximum output power. Linearity measurement has shown a high third-order intercept point of 52 dBm. Analysis shows the amplifier has the ability to extend spurious-free dynamic range by 2 3 times. The amplifier also has shown a residual phase floor close to 140 dBc at 10-kHz offset from the carrier with 5-6-dB reductions compared to a single MMIC amplifier it integrates.

Dense arrays of tapered-slot or finline transitions have proven useful in the design of compact spatial power combiners. In this paper, a design procedure is established for tapered finline arrays, providing a broad-band impedance match to a target load over the waveguide band. The procedure is based on an extension of the Klopfenstein optimal taper design to a non-TEM waveguiding structures, and employs the spectral-domain method to the computation of propagation constants in the array structure. The method has been experimentally verified for a small -band array. Data is also presented, which shows that insertion loss in the finline arrays is independent of the number of array elements, assuming the designs are optimized for the desired return-loss characteristics in each case.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract