Measurements of a Planar Nine-Way Metamaterial Power-Combined Amplifier

In this paper, measurement results of a planar nine-way metamaterial power-combined amplifier are presented. The power-divider/combiner structure is a metamaterial lens composed of positive refractive index (PRI) material with right-handed unit cells and zero refractive index (ZRI) material with left-handed unit cells. Due to its uniform isolation characteristics, the graceful degradation performance of this power-combined amplifier is shown to be independent of the amplifier failure sequence. The power combining of nine 1-W amplifiers gives an output power of 7.64 W with a combining efficiency of 85% at 1.008 GHz, and the graceful degradation characteristic of this power-combined amplifier is experimentally demonstrated.