A Miniaturized Three Way Power Divider

Jun–Bo Jiang, Ze–Hong Yan, Fang-Fang Fan, Xin Zhang

Key National Laboratory of Antennas and Microwave Technology,
Xidian University,Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710071,People’s Republic of China.
jbjiang@mail.xidian.edu.cn

Abstract-A miniaturized three-way Wilkinson power divider that of each section is quarter-wave, and the resistances R1 and
provides equal power split over a wide bandwidth implemented
on a single-layer printed circuit board (PCB) is presented. In this R2 of the planar isolation resistors are selected as
work, the bent microstirp line replaces the straight microstrip R1 64.95: and R2 200: , respectively. In the design of a
line of the conventional power divider, thus, the size of the
three-way power divider, the straight microstrip line of the
proposed power divider is 44.75 mm×70 mm, which is much
smaller than the conventional proposed power divider. Good conventional three-way power divider is substituted by the
experimental performances of the proposed power divider, bent microstirp line to miniaturize the size of the divider
including an even power split, low loss, and good isolation drastically. The size of this structure is about 44.75mm×70mm,
between the output ports are obtained. Measured results show which is much smaller than a conventional one at the same
that VSWR of the input and three output ports is less than 1.6 center frequency. The photograph of manufactured Wilkinson
across the bandwidth from 0.7 to 1.1GHz. power divider is shown in Fig. 2.
I. INTRODUCTION
Power dividers are indispensable components commonly
used to split an input signal into two or more output signals in
wireless network, RF, and microwave communications. The
Wilkinson power divider was invented in 1960 [1] with good
output matching and sufficiently high isolation. Microstrip
N-way power dividers are employed in many passive and
active microwave devices [2-4]. However, their designs
become challenging when N is greater than 2. The reason is
that, for large N, it is difficult to achieve a simultaneous good
return loss at input/output ports and high isolation and power
balance between output ports. Rapid development of
microwave and millimeter wave communication systems
greatly stimulates the demand on high performance power
dividers with compact size, low insertion loss, wide isolation Fig. 1 Geometry of the proposed three way power divider
bandwidth, and low cost. To obtain high performance power
dividers, tremendous efforts have been made to develop new
type of power dividers [5-8].
In this paper, a novel miniaturized Wilkinson power divider
with low insertion loss, perfect symmetric power division, and
wide operating bandwidth is studied. The structure of the
power divider is simple and low cost. Details of the power
divider design are described, and experimental results of the
proposed power divider are presented and discussed.

II. WILKINSON POWER DIVIDER DESIGN

Fig.1 shows the sketch of the proposed three-way
Wilkinson power divider, which operates from 0.7 to 1.1 GHz.
The proposed Wilkinson power divider is designed on a
substrate with a relative permittivity of 2.65, loss tangent
tanį= 0.001 and dielectric thickness (h =1mm). Here, we
proposed Port 1 is the input port. Port 2, 3 and 4 are the output
ports. Assuming all the impedances of the input and three Fig. 2 Photograph of the fabricated three way power divider

output ports be 50ȍ, the characteristic impedances Z11 and III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Z 22 are selected as Z11 114: and Z 22 65.8: , the length The simulated and measured VSWR obtained using HFSS
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978-1-4244-2193-0/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE


v11 and WILTRON37269A vector network analyzer are
presented in Fig. 3. It can be seen that the measured VSWR is
less than 1.6 in the operating band, which reasonably agrees
with the simulated results with an acceptable frequency
discrepancy, which may be because of the difference between
the simulated and the measured environments. The measured
results of the insertion loss are about 4.77±0.023 dB at 0.9
GHz. These indicate that the designed power divider can
successfully separate an incoming signal into three parts with
equivalent amplitudes. The difference of simulated isolation
between port3 and port2 and the one between port3 and port4
is small, which are better than 30 dB at 0.9 GHz. The
measured isolation between port2 and port4 is better than 33
dB at 0.9 GHz. The measured phases of the three outputs are
about 121°±0.35 at 0.9 GHz. Hereby, the phase-amplitude
consistency is accomplished well by the proposed power
divider.
Fig. 5 Measured angle of S21 , S31 , S 41 for the proposed three way power
divider

-20
mag(S42 )measured
-22

-24
Isolation( dB)
-26

-28

-30

-32

-34

7.00E+008 8.00E+008 9.00E+008 1.00E+009 1.10E+009

Frequency(Hz)

Fig. 3 Simulated and measured VSWR of the proposed three way power Fig. 6 Measured magnitude of S42 for the proposed three way power divider
divider
-4.5 IV. CONCLUSIONS
-4.6 A miniaturized three-way power divider is proposed and
-4.7
demonstrated. Using two-section transmission lines, the novel
circuit configuration can provide a wide bandwidth. Good
Insertion Loss(dB)

-4.8 agreement between simulation and measurement is achieved.

-4.9 Measured results show the proposed power divider can
-5.0
provide good RF performances on return loss, amplitude
balance and isolation.
-5.1
mag(S21) measured
-5.2 mag(S31) measured REFERENCES
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