An ultra-compact power divider for MMIC applications

A miniaturized power divider implemented in 0.15μ m Gallium Nitride technology, using a combination of stepped impedance transmission lines and a capacitive loading technique is presented. The circuit implementation challenges which include a trade-off between the circuit compactness, fractional bandwidth and width of the lines versus the loaded capacitor value is demonstrated for the first time. This design achieves an overall compactness of 85% compared to the conventional Wilkinson power divider and a fractional bandwidth of 69%. The measured insertion loss is 0.8 dB. The proposed power divider demonstrates the minimum measured magnitude and phase imbalance combination which is lower than 0.06 dB and 1.1° respectively compared to the state-of-the art designs reported in literature.