3/5/2018

Coupled line coupler

MICROWAVE COUPLERS
AND POWER DIVIDERS

Hakan P. Partal, Ph.D.

(Pozar)

Planar Microwave Couplers Edge Coupled Line Coupler Design

Coupled Microstrip line Design
Edge Coupled Strip line Design on a substrate with Er=10.
• Hybrid couplers – 3dB equal split, 90deg
• Directional couplers – Sampling power and
usually monitoring the main signal,
-10, -20, -30dB couplers, etc.

– Coupled line couplers –

– Branch line couplers
– Lange couplers

- Microstrip, stripline, multilayer…

- Couplers are designed based on ¼ wavelength (λ/4)
long resonators.

Couplers
Microstrip line calculations

Isolation (dB) =Coupling+Directivity (Pozar)

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Couple Line Coupler Design Example

Homework: Design the following coupler in AWR
and simulate S parameters
Design a 15dB Microstrip directional
coupler for 7.5GHz, using a substrate of
Dk=10 and thickness of 0.508mm.

l @ 7.5GHz=4.45mm
We can also use Transmission line calculation tool in Ansoft, AWR, etc.

Couple Line Coupler Design Examle

Isolation (dB) =Coupling+Directivity

Lumped Quadrature (90deg) Coupler Branchline Coupler – Quadrature

– Easy to fabricate
– Easy to integrate to other circuits
– Symmetry (any port as input)
– Can fold for miniaturization
– Narrow band

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Recent Studies on
Branchline couplers

Lange Coupler (Quadrature)

• Tighter coupling with wider bandwidth

The finger widths and spacings can be read from the graph plotting
coupled micro-strip line data against even and odd mode line
impedances.

Lange Coupler Design Example

Design a lange coupler for use at 7.5GHz,
3dB split into 50 ohms. Coupler made from
a 0.508mm thick, Dielectric substrate of
Dk=10. Determine S and W of fingers.

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Simulation setup Unequal Power Division

for Lange coupler example

Pozar

Simulation results N-way Wilkinson combiners

for Lange coupler example • Radial combiners are called that because they have radial symmetry. Above
N=2, the splitter cannot be laid out in two dimensions.
• For N=3 split, there are two ways to realize the isolation resistors, the "star" and
"delta" configurations.
• A three-way Wilkinson is shown below, with "star-resistor" configuration. The
arms have impedance SQRT(3)xZ0, and the resistors have impedance Z0.
•

N-way divider:
( Not production friendly)

Wilkinson Power Dividers PLANAR 3-way Wilkinson splitters

Equal Split dividers
• The wilkinson power splitter provides a 3-dB split with no phase shift. In
microstrip form the two arms are usually made from quarter wavelength
lines with an impedance of 70.7 ohms in a 50-ohm system.
• The splitter type below is imperfect, missing an isolation resistor between
the two outer ports, however, this is what makes it easy to lay out.
• The three arms each employ a single quarter-wave impedance transformer. If
you were to impedance match port 1 at center frequency, the transformers
would all be 86.6 ohms (transforms each 50 ohm leg to 150 ohms, and three
150 ohms in parallel is 50 ohms).
• With optimizations, Z1 can be found to be 91.4 ohms and R1 was 83.6 ohms,
resulting in -15 dB bandwidth of 39%.

The bandwidth of the lumped

Wilkinson is approximately ½ of the
micro-strip version

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5 WAY 16-18.5 GHz POWER SPLITTER

A 4-Way Divider Schematic Measured Results
N-way divider-
production friendly

Pozar

3-way Wideband Divider Example Pictures of dividers

5-way Divider Example Pictures of dividers