Measurement of a planar 9-way metamaterial power combined amplifier

In this paper, a planar 9-way metamaterial power combined amplifier is presented. The power divider/combiner structure is a metamaterial lens composed of positive refractive index (PRI) material with right-handed unit cells and zero refractive index (ZRI) material with left-handed unit cells. A semi-circular interface is between PRI and ZRI materials. Due to its uniform isolation characteristics of the power divider/combiner, the graceful degradation performance of this power combined amplifier is shown to be independent of the amplifier failure sequence. The power combining of nine 1 W amplifiers gives an output power of 7.64 W with a combining efficiency of 85% at 1.008 GHz, and the graceful degradation characteristic of this power combined amplifier is experimentally demonstrated.