On power distribution in additive amplifiers

Abstract

An analysis of the linear power distribution in amplifiers employing the additive amplification principle has been made. It reveals the wide spread of the active devices' contributions to the output power at any one frequency and exposes the band-sharing nature of the additive amplification process in multioctave amplifiers. Reversals in the direction of the energy flow over parts of the frequency band converting active into passive devices were observed. The flat gain response of these amplifiers is found to be the result of a sophisticated process in balancing the active devices' output powers. The computed and measured performance parameters of a 6-18-GHz 2*2 matrix amplifier with emphasis on its experimental multilinear behavior are briefly discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>