Stepped impedance magnetic compression modulator

Abstract

A novel, improved magnetic compression based stepped impedance transmission line pulse generator circuit is presented. It is shown that discharging an initially charged lumped element transmission line with saturable inductor switches in each cell can result in complete energy transfer between cells of different capacitances provided the cell capacitances are in a certain fixed sequence independent of the cell inductances. The use of pre-charge voltage in such stepped impedance magnetic compression line provides voltage multiplication in addition to pulse compression without the use of transformers.