A kicker driver for the international linear collider

Diversified Technologies, Inc. (DTI), under a SBIR grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, is developing a driver for a kicker strip-line deflector which inserts and extracts charge bunches to and from the electron and positron damping rings of the International Linear Collider. The ultimate ILC damping ring kicker driver must drive a 50 Ohm load (a 50 Ohm terminated TEM deflector blade) at 10 kV with 2 ns flat-topped pulses according to the ILC pulsing protocol, which is to burst pulses at a 3 MHz rate within one-millisecond bursts occurring at a 5 Hz rate. The driver must also effectively absorb high-order mode signals emerging from the deflector itself. In this paper, DTI will describe a promising approach to the design of the kicker driver involving high voltage DSRDs (Drift Step Recovery Diodes) and high voltage MOSFETs. The prototypical system provides only 5 kV pulses, but otherwise satisfies the ILC requirements. Because of the very high pulse rate required, this design is using an all-electronic, rather than magnetic, approach to pulse compression.