RF Systems Pulsed Amplifiers

HF, UHF, VHF, L, S, C bands with power from 1 to 150KW, water cooled and hot swapping available

 Click here to see the entire Empower RF Systems Pulsed RF Amplifiers

 Utilizing GaN on SiC and LDMOS, Empower RF is among the first to successfully employ these device technologies into multi-kilowatt pulse RF and microwave amplifier systems. With design and manufacturing in Southern California, Empower RF has a proven track record delivering reliable RF and microwave high power pulsed solid state amplifiers for Radar and related research, EW, threat simulators, DO-160 Section 20, Mil-Std 464, automotive, semiconductor device characterization and multipaction testing.

Features and Capabilities

• Long Duty Cycles to 25%
• Pulse Widths to 500 microseconds
• Rise and Fall Times as Fast as 150nsec
• Excellent Droop Performance
• 400Hz and DC optional
• Click here for «What is Pulse Shaping» Data Sheet
• Mismatch Tolerance 3 to 1 to Full Rated Power, 6 to 1 up to ½ Psat.
• High MTTF’s
• Touchscreen Plus Remote Monitoring and Control via Web Browser
• Very High Power Narrow Band Models Available for Linear Accelerators and Plasma Generators
• Pulse Width and Duty Cycle Error alarms

Scalable Pulsed Power Architecture

For very high power pulsed applications Empower developed a scalable amplifier with an expandable system hardware architecture designed to save you money- «you buy only the power you need today» and add power amplifier blocks later when your test or application requires more output power. Adding 3U power amplifier blocks in the future is accomplished easily and simply with no phase matching or other tuning required. For mission critical applications, which often require a complete spare backup system, our scalable architecture allows for this to be accomplished with minimal additional hardware at a fraction of the cost of a duplicate spare system. This scalable approach has the added benefit that one design covers many power levels so custom and semi-custom requirements are easily accommodated reducing our design effort to primarily that of the external combiner.

Alternatives to TWT

Solid state has a well documented overall cost of ownership and reliability advantages over the TWT in a continually expanding list of available power and bandwidth combinations. The first warning comes from recognizing the warranty on TWT amplifiers is often 1 year versus the standard 3 year warranty on equivalent SSPA’s. TWT’s also suffer from their single point of failure architecture in addition to inferior MTTF. Empowers pulsed SSPA’s amplifiers have a built in N+1 redundancy inherent to the architecture and for critical transmit applications a factory preset is available for “always transmitting” in the event of certain component failures or high VSWR conditions. Long duty cycles are also available.

Pulse Shape Duplicating

Here’s the problem we are solving: High power amplifiers do a poor job duplicating the input signal without distortions. Due to the pulse transient response of the amplifier the output will over shoot, ring and droop, introducing undesired low and high frequency components into other parts of the spectrum. By using a digital feedback loop within the rf chain, the amplifier issues can be fixed where they occur, within the amplifier, eliminating the need for exciter pulse manipulation or custom tuning. In most test applications merely duplicating the clean pulse of the input signal generator is a tremendous benefit but pulse shape duplicating will also duplicate imperfect pulses, which is new capability for EW threat simulation applications where this duplicating ability allows the amplifier to reproduce recorded adversary pulse signals with high fidelity. Consult the factory if this capability is desired.

Empower RF Systems NextGenSystems Solid State Broadband High Power Amplifier Family Brochure