Thermal management for high-power active amplifier arrays

Much of the active array work reported to date has been directed toward the demonstration of prototypes at low-power levels. Analysis results presented here show that overheating failures will occur as these arrays are scaled to reasonable output powers. Large air-cooled heat sinks attached to the backside of a thinned array can be used for single-sided designs such as oscillator arrays, but heat sinking becomes substantially more difficult for two-sided transmission-type arrays. For these designs, a possible solution is described which uses an aluminum-nitride dielectric layer to facilitate conduction to heat sinks on the array´s perimeter