A G-Band Pulsed Wave-Traveling Wave Tube for THz Radar

The growing interest in high-power amplifiers for the terahertz (THz) radar system leads to significant performance improvements of THz wave traveling-wave tubes (TWT). This article presents a detailed development of a G-band pulsed wave TWT with 120 W output power. Three approaches have been combined to improve the tube’s output power including proposing the modified folded waveguide (MFWG) slow wave structure (SWS), using large beam current, and adopting phase velocity tapering (PVT). Firstly, the MFWG SWS circuit has an additional degree of freedom that can be used to achieve approximately 36% higher interaction impedance than that in the conventional folded waveguide (CFWG). Subsequently, the electron beam current was increased to approximately 100 mA to boost the DC power of the electron beam. Finally, the PVT technology dramatically enhanced the output power from 98 W to 143 W, concomitant with a notable increase in electronic efficiency from 4.75% to 7.03%. Hot experimental results show that the measured output power can be over 100 W at 20% duty cycle within a bandwidth of 5 GHz when the operation voltage and the current are 22.48 kV and 103.5 mA, respectively. In addition, the maximum power is 121 W with the corresponding electronic efficiency of 5.1%. The proposed G-band 100 W TWT will have broad applications in far-distance high-resolution imaging.