TABLE OF CONTENTS The three chapters in this section cover passive microwave components, vacuum electronic devices, and microwave semiconductor devices.
A broad range of passive devices (Chap. 7.1) enable the transmission, sampling, filtering, and impedance matching of UHF and microwave power. Rigid rectangular waveguide is widely used for transmission. Flexible coaxial cable is employed for short runs, in cases where its higher attenuation can be tolerated. In lower power applications microstrip technology provides advantages in miniaturization and conformal configurations.
Chapter 7.2 is devoted principally to vacuum electronic devices, both traditional and advanced. Modern materials and design methods have advanced the RF vacuum device orders of magnitude in performance over that of the earlier glass envelope vacuum tube. While magnetrons and klystrons were used in World War II receivers, postwar funding of particle accelerator development resulted in klystrons having a 10 3 increase in peak power. Later developments designed to overcome bandwidth limitations of klystrons include the clustered cavity technique. The klystrode, an advanced version of the inductive output tube (IOT), offers reduced length and weight as a result of prebunching the beam. The traveling-wave tube (TWT) is a linear-beam device that amplifies microwave signals to high power levels over broad bandwidths. It finds diverse applications in communications, radar, and electronic countermeasure systems, and aerospace and avionics where low weight and volume, and minimizing power consumption are required. A further step to miniaturization of RF systems is...
