Design and Power Performance Measurement of a Planar Metamaterial Power-Combined Amplifier

A 200 W broadband high power amplifier using hybrid power combining network and digital level control

“…Due to the power capability limitations in SSPAs, power combining techniques have been introduced to combine multiple SSPAs outputs for achieving a high output power . Therefore, different power divider/combiner structures have been developed to achieve a low loss and high power combining efficiency …”

“…Power combining techniques mainly use N ‐way structures with different characteristics/configurations to obtain the desired output power. Depending on the desired properties, the existing configurations are classified into two main groups; binary structure (eg, planar microstrip Wilkinson), and parallel structure (eg, radial and spatial combiners) . The conventional planar binary structures such as T‐junction, Wilkinson, branch‐line, and ring coupler can produce good isolation and a broadband power combining with more than 100% fractional bandwidth .…”

“…4,7 Therefore, different power divider/ combiner structures have been developed to achieve a low loss and high power combining efficiency. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Power combining techniques mainly use N-way structures with different characteristics/configurations to obtain the desired output power. Depending on the desired properties, the existing configurations are classified into two main groups; binary structure (eg, planar microstrip Wilkinson), and parallel structure (eg, radial and spatial combiners).…”

“…Depending on the desired properties, the existing configurations are classified into two main groups; binary structure (eg, planar microstrip Wilkinson), and parallel structure (eg, radial and spatial combiners). [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] The conventional planar binary structures such as T-junction, Wilkinson, branchline, and ring coupler can produce good isolation and a broadband power combining with more than 100% fractional bandwidth. [16][17][18] This is due to the fact that in the planar binary structures, the electromagnetic waves propagate in TEM mode.…”

Experiments of device failures in a planar nine-way metamaterial power-combined amplifier

“…Specifically, the PRI material is composed of 2-D RH unit cells, while the ZRI material is realized by arranging 2-D RH and LH unit cells in a checkerboard tessellation [8], or by using only LH unit cells operated at the infinite wavelength frequency to give the zero-phase shift characteristic [9]. This paper investigates the degradation characteristic of a planar nine-way metamaterial power-combined amplifier [10] with device failures. Due to its uniform isolation characteristics of the metamaterial powerdividing/combining structure [9], the graceful degradation performance of this power-combined amplifier is shown to be independent of the amplifier failure sequence.…”