440
7, JULY 2009
Miniaturized Microstrip Wilkinson Power
Divider With Harmonic Suppression
Jianpeng Wang, Jia Ni, Yong-Xin Guo, Senior Member, IEEE, and Dagang Fang, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—A microstrip Wilkinson power divider with harmonic
suppression and size reduction is presented in this letter. The pro-
posed power divider not only effectively reduces its occupied area
to 36.5% of the conventional design at 2.65 GHz but also has higher
order harmonics suppression. From the measured results, a 29 dB
suppression for the third harmonic and a 34 dB suppression for the
fifth harmonic are achieved while maintaining the characteristics
of a conventional Wilkinson power divider. Based on a 15 dB re-
turn-loss criteria, the measured fractional bandwidth is 48%. At
an operation frequency of 2.65 GHz, the insertion losses are better
than 3.4 dB, the return loss is 27 dB, and the isolation is better than
22 dB.
Index Terms—Harmonic suppression, microstrip, slow-wave
structures, Wilkinson power divider.
I. INTRODUCTION
W ILKINSON power dividers are widely used in various
microwave applications such as power amplifiers,
mixers, and frequency multipliers [1]. The conventional power
divider is composed of two quarter-wavelength transmis-
sion-line sections at the designed frequency, which results in a
large occupied area especially at low frequencies. Therefore,
many methods were proposed to reduce the size of power
divider as reported in [2]–[7].
By capacitive loading of the quarter wave transmission lines
employed in conventional Wilkinson power divider, Scardelletti
et al. designed a Wilkinson power divider with its circuit area
reduced to 26% of the conventional design [2]. This design
was based on standard IC processing to gain high capacitive
loading. On the other hand, based on standard printed-cir-
cuit-board (PCB) etching processes, compact Wilkinson power
divider can also be designed in the form of slow-wave loading.
Using a -type multiple coupled slow-wave microstrip line
structure, Lee et al. introduced a Wilkinson power divider with
a circuit area reduction of 63% of the conventional one [3]. In
[4], [5] microstrip electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure
Manuscript received December 21, 2008; revised March 25, 2009. First pub-
lished June 23, 2009; current version published July 09, 2009 This work was
supported by the Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant 60671038,
China Postdoctoral Foundation under Grant AD41209, Jiangsu Province Post-
doctoral Foundation under Grant AD41197, and by Singapore Ministry of Edu-
cation Academic Research Fund Tier 1 project under Grant R-263-000-534-133.
J. Wang, J. Ni, and D. Fang are with the Ministrial Key Laboratory of JGMT,
NJUST, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
(e-mail: jianpeng_wang1980@yahoo.com.cn).
Y.-X. Guo is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
National University of Singapore (e-mail: eleguoyx@nus.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2009.2022124
1531-1309/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.
was utilized in the power divider design. Compact Wilkinson
power divider with harmonic suppression can be realized due
to the bandstop and slow wave characteristics of EBG.
Power divider with EBG cells effectively reduced the occu-
pied area to 70% of the conventional case in [4] and to 61% of
the conventional one in [5]. In [4] the third and fifth harmonic
suppression were about 32.5 dB and 12 dB, respectively. Fur-
thermore, as defected ground structure (DGS) can provide the
same properties as EBG, it was also used to design compact and
harmonic suppression power divider. Using DGS in Wilkinson
power divider design, Woo et al. proposed a Wilkinson power
divider with occupied area reduced to 90% of the conventional
case in [6]. This power divider also achieved a 26 dB second
harmonic suppression and a 25 dB third harmonic suppression.
Recently resonant-type left-handed transmission lines have also
been applied to compact Wilkinson power dividers design [7].
The saved circuit size of the power divider proposed in [7] is
about 50% as compared with conventional design.
In this letter, a miniaturized microstrip Wilkinson power
divider based on standard printed-circuit-board (PCB) etching
processes is presented. It has four microstrip high-low
impedance resonator cells uniformly placed inside the
Wilkinson power divider resulting in high slow-wave ef-
fect. The proposed power divider not only effectively reduces
the occupied area to 36.5% of the conventional one at 2.65 GHz
but also has a more than 29 dB suppression for the third
harmonic and 34 dB suppression for the fifth harmonic. The
measured fractional bandwidth is 48% when dB.
In the operation frequency band, measured power splits are
about dB and phase difference between and
is about , which indicates a good work performance.
II. CIRCUIT DESIGN
The configuration of the proposed power divider is shown in
Fig. 1, which consists of four high-low impedance resonators
placed inside the free area of a conventional power divider.
Each high-low impendence resonator is constructed by a high-
impedance line cascaded with a low-impedance line. This type
of loading will introduce four high-low impedance resonators
that are parallel with the main transmission lines of the power di-
vider. Fig. 2 shows the equivalent circuit of the proposed power
divider under odd-mode and even-mode exciting respectively.
In the circuit, models the main transmission lines and
models the high-impedance lines. accounts for the gap cou-
pling effect between two adjacent low-impedance lines and
accounts for the capacitive loading effect caused by the low-
impedance lines. Notice that the capacitance effects of the main
transmission line and the high-impedance line are not included
WANG et al.: MINIATURIZED MICROSTRIP WILKINSON POWER DIVIDER WITH HARMONIC SUPPRESSION
Fig. 1. Proposed power divider.
Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit of the Wilkinson power divider: (a) Odd-mode,
(b) Even-mode.
in the equivalent circuit as they are trivial. Based on Fig. 2,
it is seen that capacitances and caused by the loading
high-low impedance resonators could achieve large shunt ca-
pacitance, thus resulting in compact divider topology because
the propagation constant is given by
(1)
where L represents total inductance in per unit length resulted
from the main transmission line and high-impedance lines, and
C denotes the total capacitance in per unit length main transmis-
sion line of the power divider caused by the low impedance line
and the coupling between adjacent two low impedance lines.
Due to the capacitance C is greatly larger than that of the trans-
mission line of a conventional power divider, the propagation
constant is enhanced drastically, corresponding to a greatly re-
duced circuit size. This new type of slow-wave loading does not
occupy extra area of the circuit as the high-low impedance res-
onators are placed inside the free area of conventional power
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441
Fig. 3. Simulated and measured S-parameters of the Wilkinson power divider:
(a) insertion loss and (b) return loss.
divider. It has also been applied to miniaturized 3-dB coupler
design in [8]. We can get a desired slow-wave factor by ad-
justing the structure parameters of the new power divider prop-
erly. Therefore, with optimal design and EM simulation, the di-
mensions of the proposed power divider are as follows:
mm, mm, mm, mm,
mm, mm. They can be
easily implemented by using the standard printed-circuit-board
etching processes. The characteristic impedances of the three
ports are 50 . An isolation resistor (100 ) is implemented be-
tween port 2 and port 3. The substrate used here has a relative
dielectric constant of 3.38 and a thickness of 0.508 mm, and the
total area of the proposed new power divider is 40.72 mm .
III. SIMULATED AND MEASURED RESULTS
Simulation was accomplished using IE3D, which is an
electromagnetic simulation software based on the method of
moment (MOM). Measurement was carried out on an Agilent
5230A network analyzer. Fig. 3(a) shows the simulated and
measured insertion loss of proposed power divider. Fig. 3(b)
shows the results of return loss. Referring to the measured
results in Fig. 3, the central frequency located at 2.65 GHz
can be clearly observed. At the central frequency, the mea-
sured and are dB, dB and dB,
respectively.
From Fig. 3(a) we can also observe that at higher frequen-
cies, the proposed power divider performs like a low pass filter
with a high frequency rejection, which has resulted in a 29 dB
suppression for third harmonic and a 34 dB suppression for fifth
442
Fig. 4. Simulated and Measured S of the Wilkinson Power divider.
Fig. 5. Measured phase difference between S and S of the Wilkinson
power divider.
TABLE I
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF CONVENTIONAL
AND PROPOSED WILKINSON POWER DIVIDERS
harmonic. This is because the loading capacitance shifts the spu-
rious resonant frequencies of the resonator from the integer mul-
tiples of the fundamental resonant frequency, thereby reducing
interferences from high-order harmonics [9], [10]. The conven-
tional Wilkinson power divider does not have this property; it
has periodic resonance at all odd harmonics. As for the sim-
ulated and measured in Fig. 4, the measured isolation is
better than 22 dB. It means a good isolation performance be-
tween port 2 and port 3 has been achieved. Fig. 5 shows the
phase difference between and , the measured phase dif-
ference is about . It indicates a good in-phase performance.
In order to study the size reduction, we have also investigated
a conventional Wilkinson power divider which operates at the
same frequency. Table I lists the performance comparison of the
proposed power divider with conventional design. As listed in
Table I, the area of the proposed power divider occupies only
36.5% of the conventional one at 2.65 GHz. Fig. 6 is the pho-
tograph of fabricated miniaturized microstrip Wilkinson power
divider.
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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 7, JULY 2009
Fig. 6. Photograph of the proposed Wilkinson power divider.
IV. CONCLUSION
A miniaturized Wilkinson power divider has been presented.
Due to the high slow-wave factor, the new structure has effec-
tively reduced the occupied area to 36.5% of the conventional
case at about 2.65 GHz. The high slow-wave factor has been
generated with the high-low impedance loading properly ad-
justed. A sample microstrip Wilkinson power divider has been
fabricated and measured. Measured results indicate at operation
frequency the magnitudes of and are about dB
with a phase difference of . This performance is comparable
to conventional Wilkinson power divider. Furthermore, the new
power divider also has a more than 29 dB suppression for the
third harmonic and 34 dB suppression for the fifth harmonic.
The proposed power divider is compact, easy for fabrication,
and applicable for microwave system application.
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