Design of a re-entrant double-staggered ladder circuit for V-band coupled-cavity traveling-wave tubes

The re-entrant double-staggered ladder slow-wave structure is employed in a high-power V-band coupled-cavity traveling-wave tube. This structure has a wide bandwidth, a moderate interaction impedance, and excellent thermal dissipation properties, as well as easy fabrication. A well-matched waveguide coupler is proposed for the structure. Combining the design of attenuators, a full-scale three-dimensional circuit model for the V-band coupled-cavity traveling-wave tube is constructed. The electromagnetic characteristics and the beam–wave interaction of this structure are investigated. The beam current is set to be 100 mA, and the cathode voltage is tuned from 16.8 kV to 15.8 kV. The calculation results show that this tube can produce a saturated average output power over 100 W with an instantaneous bandwidth greater than 1.25 GHz in the frequency ranging from 58 GHz to 62 GHz. The corresponding gain and electronic efficiency can reach over 32 dB and 6.5%, respectively.