3. Conclusion

This article provides an overview of traveling wave tubes (TWTs), explaining how they work and the performance they can deliver in terms of frequency, power, linearity and efficiency. For decades, TWTs have been an indispensable building block for radar systems and terrestrial telecommunications infrastructures. In 2017, their fields of application have evolved; their use in defense systems is increasingly moving towards the millimeter frequency spectrum (beyond 15GHz), and in the longer term the concession of submillimeter frequencies (beyond 70GHz) could offer an opportunity linked to the deployment of 5G networks. However, the area in which TWTs are and remain unavoidable is that of satellite transmissions, particularly for the onboard segment, for reasons (in decreasing order of importance) of efficiency, bandwidth and power. On-board satellite equipment is constrained by its power consumption,...