Pulsed Power Generation by Solid-State LTD

A solid-state linear transformer driver stack has been developed to demonstrate pulsed power generation and output pulse shaping. It consists of 30 modules each using 24 power metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors as switches. The output voltage of the stack is the superposition of the voltage pulse of each module no matter if the modules are switched synchronously or not. In synchronous operation, the output voltages of all modules are added up to reach an output voltage up to ~29 kV with a maximum output current of ~240 A. The pulsewidth is variable in the range of 50-170 ns. On the other hand, by carrying out separate switching of different modules, the output waveform can be varied by performing pulse shaping. The control signals for pulse shaping experiment are generated using an field-programmable gate array board that allows potentially automatic waveform optimization.