THERMAL MANAGEMENT FOR HIGH-POWER ACTIVE AMPLIFIER ARRAYS

Much of the active array work reported to date has been directed towar d the demonstration of prototypes at low-power levels, Analysis result s presented here show that overheating failures will occur as these ar rays are scaled to reasonable output powers. Large air-cooled heat sin ks attached to the backside of a thinned array can be used for single- sided designs such as oscillator arrays, but heat sinking becomes subs tantially more difficult for two-sided transmission-type arrays, For t hese designs, a possible solution is described which uses an aluminum- nitride dielectric layer to facilitate conduction to heat sinks on the array's perimeter.