Coupled Oscillators

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New for October 2021. Coupled oscillators are kind of obscure for a power source at microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies. But consider the 8000-way power divider that was needed to feed a 95 GHz 7kW amplifier for a solid state active denial system.. What if you just made 1W oscillators and coupled 8000 of them together? It's never been done that we know of, and maybe there are good reasons that it cannot be done (the array of oscillators would be multiple wavelengths in overall dimensions). But what if two oscillators could be made to lock together through their DC supply? Then scale up that thought... and let us know what you think. If the array's outputs are spatially combined, you are living the dream: no divider network and almost no output loss. And in the special case of active denial systems, no one is going to care about phase noise!

Microwaves101 Hall of Famer Christiaan Huygens first investigated this effect back in 1665. Somewhat more recently, the people over at Veritasium posted a great video on the subject. As the video describes, coupled oscillators can occur in nature, with gravitational, chemical, mechanical and electrical coupling. There is often no greater an engineering solution than trying to imitate nature to solve a problem.

Coupled oscillators