Interest in MM waves spurs tube growth

Military demand is growing for new components which can be used in advanced radar, electronic counter-measures, and communications equipment. Unfortunately, the techniques used in building microwave tubes for lower frequencies cannot be translated easily to millimeter-wave-length components. Thus, designers must come up with new techniques, new materials, and most importantly, new circuit forms which will provide the required performance while allowing the components to be manufactured at reasonable cost and production rates. Attention is given to requirements for permanent magnets, periodic permanent magnets, traveling-wave tubes, millimeter-wave klystrons, extended interaction amplifiers, the use of space-harmonic and non-space-harmonic traveling-wave tubes for applications requiring bandwidths in excess of several hundred MHz, Gyrotron size advantages, cathode loading problems, and future requirements.