Cold Plate Design, Fabrication, and Demonstration for High-Power Ka-Band Active Electronically Scanned Arrays

Recent developments in mm-Wave Active Electronically Scanned Arrays (AESA) are the primarily focus on 5G applications requiring low transmit power. For some applications where high transmit power is required, the thermal management becomes a serious challenge because of two reasons: poor efficiency of the power amplifiers and closely spaced radiating elements at mm-wave frequencies. In this work we demonstrate the cooling system of a 256-element AESA operating at Ka-Band dissipating about 1kW over an area of less than 3 × 3 inches.