Ultra-high-power repetitive solid state DBD-based switching

A delayed breakdown device (DBD) presents a closing switch employing the process of fast filling of the semiconductor structure with plasma produced by an ionizing shock wave. The DBD-effect was discovered by I.V. Grekhov and A.F. Kardo-Sysoev in 1979. Today the most powerful DBDs containing several series-connected semiconductor structures form pulses with amplitude of about 10/sup 4/ V and a peak power of units of MW at a 50-/spl Omega/ load. We tried to extend the DBD-based switching process to output voltages equal to hundreds of kV and an output power of several hundreds of MW by connecting many large-square structures in series. The experiments showed that this approach permits increasing the peak power by more than two orders of magnitude (up to 1 GW) at the FWHM of about 2 ns.