A High-Voltage Pulse Generator With Continuously Variable Pulsewidth Based on a Modified PFN

The amount of stored energy is an important issue in the low-droop and high-precision pulse generation. Pulse forming network (PFN) simulating an open-ended transmission line seems to be useful due to its minimum stored energy. The drawbacks of the PFN include low-output pulse quality and constant pulsewidth, which limit their applications. Another limitation of generating rectangular pulses using PFN is that half of the charged voltage appears in the output when delivering the entire stored energy to the matched load. This paper proposes a structure of PFN-based pulse generator that overcomes the above-mentioned limitations. For continuous pulsewidth adjustment, a lossless scheme is presented. By increasing the ratio of the load magnitude to the characteristic impedance, the amplitude of the output pulse voltage would be approximately equal to that of the charged voltage. Therefore, the semiconductor switches can be utilized in the PFN pulse generator easily. In addition, the pulse quality is enhanced and faster rising time is obtained in comparison with the conventional PFNs. In this proposal, the stored energy quantity is limited to three times the energy needed for the output pulse in the case of R-L = 10Z(0). To verify the proposed structure, a prototype is simulated using PSPICE software, and the experimental results are presented.