Gallery: Cool circuits in evidence at the 2015 International Microwave Symposium

Not your father’s microwave oven

One of the concepts on display at the NXP Semiconductor booth was this super-charged microwave oven. Ordinary ovens, of course, use a single cavity-magnetron tube to generate microwaves. This one does away with the tube and substitutes four separate solid-state microwave power amplifiers. The neat thing about replacing the tube with solid-state electronics is that the amplifiers can be individually controlled. That means each one can have a different output amplitude, frequency, or phase, and these parameters can change on the fly. One potential application scenario: Put a plate containing four different foods in the oven, and each one can cook to perfection just through the manipulation of the power amps. NXP demonstrated the idea by putting an array of LEDs in the oven (bottom image) and harvesting microwave power to light them up (top), with different microwave frequencies actuating different colored LEDs. The driver electronics for all this is still pretty bulky; at the show, it sat in a hefty enclosure residing under the oven. NXP says it is working with microwave oven manufacturers on these concepts.
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