Compact, flexible, wideband and efficient power combining technique for spatial applications

This paper presents a new power combining technique for Solid State Power Amplifier. The compactness, the flexibility and the efficiency of this technique are underlined with the measurements of a back-to-back 8-way power combining network and several HPAs in the Ku-band. The measured combining losses are almost negligible from two to eight combined amplifier modules over a wide frequency range. The size of the 8-way HPA is 12.6cm × 6.2cm × 3.2cm. Its section is 3.6 times lower than the one of active antenna radiating element in the Ku-band. The 8-way HPA delivers an output power at 2dB compression gain higher than 30W with an associated Power Added Efficiency greater than 32% over 1GHz frequency bandwidth. The developed HPAs use proven technologies for space application.