14.07.

2023, 15:28 Back to the Future: Next-Generation Vacuum Electronics

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Back to the Future: Next-Generation Vacuum Electronics

Back to the Future: Next-Generation Vacuum Electronics

OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL
8/11/2015

Solid-state electronics began to overtake vacuum tubes in radios, computers and other electronic and radio
frequency gadgetry more than 60 years ago. Now we live in a Silicon Age. Even so, vacuum electronic
devices, whose origins date to the 19th century, touch our lives every day.

Those microwaves that heat the food in your microwave oven come from a magnetron, the vacuum tube that
made radar possible in the first half of the 20th century. Traveling wave tubes (TWTs), not solid-state
amplifiers, generate the strong electromagnetic signals in communication satellites because of their
exceptional on-orbit reliability and high power efficiency. And it’s the unique ability of vacuum tube electronic
devices to generate high-frequency signals at chip-melting operating powers that makes possible modern
aviation radar systems for navigation and collision avoidance. What’s more, there are more than 200,000
vacuum electronic devices (VEDs) now in service in the Department of Defense, powering critical
communications and radar systems that cover the land, sea, air, and space.

With its new Innovative Vacuum Electronic Science and Technology (INVEST) program, DARPA aims to
develop the science and technology base for new generations of more capable VEDs.

CAPTION: Millimeter wave vacuum tubes, including ones like the travelling wave tube (TWT) depicted here,
amplify signals by exchanging kinetic energy in the electron beam (shown as a blue line) with
electromagnetic energy (shown as a wave) in the signal. This figure represents a cutaway view of a TWT with
all of the critical components: electron gun, magnetic circuit, electron collector, and the windows that keep the
vacuum inside the tube while letting the signals flow in and out.

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“Any time you need to operate at the outer reaches of the power-
frequency parameter space, vacuum tubes are the technology of choice,”
said Dev Palmer, program manager for INVEST in DARPA’s
Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “But at the high millimeter-wave
frequencies of interest to this program, the design and construction of
VEDs is an intricate, labor-intensive process that requires exquisite
modeling tools, exotic materials, and expensive, high-precision machining.” Physical scaling laws have been
the showstopper for millimeter-wave VEDs so far: as engineers push the operating frequency of electronic
devices upward, the output power from the same devices goes down. With INVEST, Palmer aims over the
next four years to create a community of researchers that will find ways through this technical bottleneck.

Notwithstanding the popular notion that vacuum electronics are old-fashioned, the incentive to overcome
technical and cost barriers to obtain next-generation VEDs is only getting stronger. “The worldwide
availability and proliferation of inexpensive, high-power commercial amplifiers and sources has made the
electromagnetic spectrum crowded and contested in the radio frequency (RF) and microwave regions,”
according to MTO’s just-published Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), which invites the technical
community to submit proposals for research that would take VED technology to new heights of power and
frequency (DARPA-BAA-15-40, published on August 11, 2015, is available on FedBizOpps:
http://go.usa.gov/3HqK9.)

VEDs capable of operating at higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths (in the millimeter wave region)
than can outperform the current generation of devices will provide significant defense advantages. Higher
power operation yields RF signals that are “louder” and thereby harder to jam and otherwise interfere with.
Meanwhile, higher frequency operation brings with it vast swaths of previously unavailable spectrum. This too
opens the way to more versatile communication, data transmission and other capabilities that will be
beneficial in both military and civilian settings.

To open pathways towards those advances, the INVEST program aims to strengthen the science and
technology base for new generations of vacuum tubes operating at millimeter-wave frequencies above 75
GHz. Those awarded contracts under the program will take on fundamental research projects in areas that
include physics-based modeling and simulation of VEDs, innovative component design, electron emission
processes, and advanced manufacturing. “As you push frequencies up, you can’t use conventional
manufacturing techniques anymore,” Palmer said, pointing to the tiny size and ultraprecise alignment of
millimeter-wave VED components, among them high-current-density cathodes, tiny vacuum envelopes, and
microparts that extract the RF signals amplified inside the component.

“If you could print the whole structure with a 3-D printer, so that everything was aligned right off the assembly
line, it would make it much easier,” Palmer says. Indeed, an ultimate and most welcome outcome would be to
transform the new scientific understanding and engineering know-how that emerges from the INVEST
program into novel tools for analyzing, synthesizing and optimizing new VED designs and then deploying
innovative advanced manufacturing methods, including 3-D printing, to actually produce the devices. Said
Palmer, “that is a beautiful vision.”

“Vacuum electronics is an infinitely deep subject,” added Palmer, whose fascination with the technology dates
to his junior-high-school days in the 1970s when he was playing his electric guitar through the glowing
vacuum tubes of his amplifier—something he continues to do today in his free time, with a continuing
preference for tube-based amplifiers over solid state ones because of the subtle acoustical enhancements
the “old” technology offers. “You have electromagnetics. You have high-temperature mechanical design. You

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have high-vacuum, magnetics, and materials science. It takes a choreographed effort across many
disciplines to create one of these vacuum tubes.”

TAGS

| Electronics | Microchips | Microstructures | Spectrum |

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IMAGES

Millimeter wave vacuum tubes, including ones like the travel ...

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