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by RachelF 2237 days ago
Most high power microwave devices aren't build on semiconductors like Silicon (solid state), yet. They are normally valves of some sort, like magnetrons, klystrons or travelling wave tubes.

Some radars would be in the mega-watt range, but only pulsed with low duty cycles or 1%.

1 comments

It sounds like the technology hasn't evolved much in the last 20-30 years then.

Around 1995 I was involved with a project where an engineer designed and built a multi-kW CW (I don't recall the exact value) pre-amp out of transistor based modules. There was a plan to apply the same approach to a later project at much higher power levels (100's of kW's) where the conventional approach would have been to use a klystron. I left that team (and the field) though so I don't know if the larger version was ever successfully implemented.

EDIT: I should note that this wasn't in the microwave regime, it was 500 MHz.