Power handling and temperature compensation design for passive Microwave devices

Summary form only given. Modern communication and radar transmitter systems require high performance RF/Microwave devices and components, to improve communication and detection range. The increase in range is accomplished by increased transmitted power and higher receiver sensitivity. The increased transmitted power requires the engineer to estimate the transmitter´s power handling capability as part of the design process. In addition, the engineer has to meet several competing requirements at a specified pressure level, such as containment of transmitted bandwidth (wide or narrow, i.e., reduce adjacent channel spill over), minimize group delay variations, and reduce performance drifts with environmental condition changes (e.g., temperature, pressure, and humidity). When designing devices for these high power operations, one often has to take into account the following effects: multipactor and ionization breakdown, passive intermodulation interferences and thermal-related issues such as temperature compensation. This talk will elaborate the physics background, technical challenges and design methodologies. It will also cover the clever use of both circuit and electromagnetic modeling techniques. Numerous examples will be presented from those widely used in the industry. The method presented is general and is applicable to all device types.