Empower RF Systems announced their new breakthrough Solid-State Power Amplifier (SSPA) family, based on a new technologically advanced liquid cooled and scalable architecture. This new technology replaces vacuum tubes to bring new capabilities to applications where tens and hundreds of kilowatts of CW and Pulse power are required at frequency ranges from HF to X-Band.
This family of SSPAs uses a unique design architecture from Empower RF Systems that yields unprecedented performance and scalability for liquid cooled SSPA’s delivering hundreds of kilowatts of pulse and CW power. This breakthrough design uses both LDMOS and GaN on SiC devices for user applications that include EW, Radar, Directed Energy, Satcom, EMC and RF Product Testing.
The new architecture brings together four major technology advancements:
1. It features fully digital Peak and RMS Detection providing waveform flexibility and accurate metering allowing asymmetrical and random pulse width and duty cycle operation on pulse amplifiers. Short and long pulse capabilities are 100ns to 500+usec and up to 500KHz PRF’s and 20% duty cycles.
2. The combination of embedded firmware, software, and real time processing/control brings multi-use flexibility to operate in any application. User selectable multimode operation can by dynamically configured. Important to note, CW amplifiers offer the same pulse performance as our pulsed amplifiers with no limit on duty cycle while pulsed amplifiers allow de-rated CW operation.
3. The amplifier has no single point of RF device failure. Its layout consists of a system controller in a 3U and up to 16 hot swappable 2U amplifier drawers with each amplifier drawer contains an integrated power supply. With this arrangement, in the event of a failure, only a fractional reduction of output power occurs the amplifier system remains on air. The 2U amplifier drawers are hot swappable and there is no high voltage power supply within the transmitter.
4. The fourth major design element is scalability which creates an affordable upgrade path for future power needs by adding hardware to an existing system. Additional racks can be combined and for racks not fully populated, 2U amplifier drawers can be added without the need for tuning, since each 2U amplifier drawer and full system rack is digitally set for phase and gain.
Click here to learn more about this liquid cooled SSPA family.
