A Modified Wilkinson Power Divider/Combiner for Ultrawideband

Communications

Osama Ahmed and A. R. Sebak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Concordia University,
1515 St. Catherine West, S-EV5.139, Montreal, Quebec, H4G 2Wl Canada
E-mail: o_ahm@encs.concordia.ca

Introduction

The Wilkinson power divider/combiner is considered to be one of the most

popular and basic components in microwave circuits and systems. it has matched
output ports with high isolation between them and low power dissipation. Several
designs and modifications have been introduced in order to increase the
bandwidth of the traditional Wilkinson power divider [1-2]. Increasing the
bandwidth can be achieved by increasing the number of sections, Le. three-section
Wilkinson power divider [3], or by adding open stubs which broaden the
bandwidth [4]. Recent years have seen a worldwide effort to develop power
dividers that can operate in the ultrawideband (UWB) frequency spectrum, Le.
3.1-10.6GHz [5-6]. This paper shows a modified Wilkinson power divider with
equal power split, good insertion loss, acceptable return loss at all ports and
satisfactory isolation performances within the whole UWB frequency range.

Design

Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of the proposed power divider for UWB
operation. To broaden the bandwidth, we used extended transmission line with the
same characteristic impedance of the main line Z3=ZI but with different electrical
length 83 following the A/4 branch of conventional one-section power divider.

ZS,8S
Port 2
ZI,81 Z3,83 (Output)
Port 1
(Input)

ZI,81 Z3,83 Port 3

(Output)
ZS,8S

Figure 1 The schematic diagram of the proposed UWB power divider/combiner

978-1-4244-3647-7/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE

Also, stepped-impedance open-circuited (OC) radial stubs are introduced at two
output ports of the Wilkinson power divider. Using these stepped-impedance OC
stubs is very popular in UWB bandpass filter design where multiple transmission
poles can be achieved over wide frequency range. By adjusting the length and
width of the stubs, the bandwidth can be broadened. The reason of using radial
stubs instead of regular ones is to obtain a wider bandwidth and smaller size.
Adding additional stub will change the circuit impedance matching, so the first
transmission lines (Zl, 81) should be extended. By tuning the length of the
extended lines (Zl, 83), the impedance of the input and output ports can be
matched over a wide frequency range. The Stepped-impedance OC stub consists
of a transmission line and a radial stub with characteristic impedances and
electrical lengths of (Z2, 82) and (ZS, 8S), respectively.
The proposed power divider is symmetric in structure, so it can be analyzed by
the even-odd decomposition method [7]. The impedance of the input and output
ports are chosen to be 50n. The radial stubs can be replaced by their equivalent
input admittance Bs • For a traditional one-section Wilkinson power divider, the
isolation resistor is selected to be R = 2Zo = 100Q and the characteristic
impedance of the A,/4 transmission line is chosen to be Zl = ~2Zo = 70.71Q. From
the full-wave analysis, the relationship between other parameters can be easily
determined. The optimized parameters are: Zl = 77.5Q, 81 = 90°, 83 = 22.25° at
the center frequency of 6.85GHz. The parameters for stepped-impedance OC
stubs are Z2 = 96Q, 82 = 10°, ZS = 50Q and 8S = 35° at the second resonance
frequency 16GHz to attain matching over the whole UWB range.

Results and Discussion

The proposed UWB power divider has been tested by simulation using full-wave
analysis with two different numerical techniques. The first one is Ansoft HFSS
software based on Finite Element (FE) method while the other one is Ansoft
Designer software based on Method of Moments (MoM). The parameters of the
proposed power divider were optimized to attain good return loss at all ports and
good isolation over the whole UWB frequency range. The substrate used in our
design is Rogers RT5880 with a thickness of 0.508mm, and a relative permittivity
of2.2. The layout of the proposed UWB power divider is presented in Figure 2.

#2

#3

Figure 2 Layout of the proposed UWB power divider/combiner.

 Table 1 Optimized Parameters of the proposed UWB power divider/combiner

Input/output lines Wo I Lo I Unit: mm

(50n microstrip lines) 1.565 I 5.0 I
Power divider WI LI W3 L3 W2 L2 Ls as
dimensions 0.9 8.0 0.9 2.0 0.5 1.0 0.5 90°

The overall size of the proposed power divider is 20x11.565mm2. It has been
shown that the proposed power divider performance is better than the traditional
three-section in [3] or the modified two-section Wilkinson power divider in [5],
with about 54.8% reduction in size. From calculated S-parameters shown in
Figure 3, the power is split equally between the output ports, Le. SI2 = SI3 = -3dB
with very small insertion loss ranges from -O.ldB to -0.5dB (using HFSS) or from
-0.5dB to -ldB (using Designer). The return losses are lower than -13dB at the
input port and lower than -10dB at the output ports through the whole UWB
range. The calculated isolation between the two outputs ports is better than -1 OdB.

O.---------.------.-----------r---------.-------r---------r-----..---------,

, , ,
,--------------------r--------------------.-------------------
, , ,
,, ,, ,,
, ,, ,,
··,,
,
, ,
,, ,,
· , ,
-10

-15 ---

m-20
~
:
------------------+--------
~ I :
Q)
Q) -25 ------------,
E

_50'------.L.....----.l......----.l......----...L...----...L...----....L...-----'---------'
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
frequency (GHz)
Figure 3 Calculated return loss, insertion loss, and isolation.

The phase difference between the two outputs ports are shown in Figure 4. It has
been shown that the two output signals are in phase with phase difference is
00±0.25° across the whole frequency band. Figure 4 presents the calculated group
delay between the input and the output ports. The group delay of the proposed
UWB power divider is almost constant and less than 120ps (0. 12ns) which shows
good linearity within the UWB frequency spectrum.
 2 170
1.5 ···················i···················.j.-················.-f.···················i···················.j..················.-f.···················i··················· 160
1 1 1 1 1 ; 1

C) 1 :j [ : ( ···············[····················1··················· 150
Q) ! ! ! ! ! i :

c.. -2
1-- : :
GD (P01°tl,P01i2) [
·90

-2.5 1- GD (portl,pol't3) I· 80

-3
3 4 5 678 9
Frequency (GHz)

Figure 4 Calculated phase difference and group delay between output ports.

Conclusions

A modified Wilkinson power divider/combiner using one added stepped-

impedance open-circuited radial stub on each branch is proposed for UWB
applications. The stepped-impedance open stub is used to introduce multiple
transmission poles through the whole UWB frequency spectrum. The simulation
results of the proposed small size and low cost power divider have shown equal
power split between the two output ports with good insertion loss and satisfactory
isolation within the whole UWB frequency range. Also, it has been shown that the
designed UWB power divider has good return loss of all ports.

References

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Microwave Theory and Techniques, Vol. 54, No.5, May 2006.
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Single-Stage Wilkinson Power Divider to Obtain Wider Bandwidth," Proc.
Asia-Pacific Microw, Conf., pp. 2325-2328, Dec. 2007.
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Power Divider", ICMMT Proceedings, 2008.
[6] Lin Yang, Qing-Xin Chu, "Design of a Compact UWB Wilkinson Power
Divider", ICMMT Proceedings, 2008.
[7] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2004.