Additive vacuum electronics: Electron beam melting of copper

摘要

The construction of vacuum electronic devices is an artisan process; it requires extremes of high precision machining and assembly and the tolerances and feature sizes become more exacting as the frequency increases. Merging of copper additive manufacturing and electropolishing technologies will produce low-cost, high-throughput fabrication techniques for construction of fully integrated vacuum electronic devices. Technology demonstrations at two frequencies (S-Band and W-band) will address the demand for fast turnaround manufacturing of travelling wave tube amplifiers in legacy military systems as well as in the emerging high frequency applications.