Design of compact power divider for MMIC applications using periodically loaded slow wave structure and MIM capacitive loading

A technique to further improve the compactness of a power divider that utilizes periodically stub-loaded slow wave structures is presented using shunt MIM capacitive loading. The circuit implementation challenges which include a trade-off between number of open stubs and the length of an open stub versus the distance between them is demonstrated. The improved power divider using MIM capacitive loading indicates an overall compactness of 73% compared to the conventional Wilkinson power and 65% compared to the power divider that utilizes only the stub-loaded slow wave structure at 32 GHz. The measured insertion loss is less than 0.67 dB. The power divider demonstrates the minimum measured magnitude and phase imbalance combination which is lower than 0.08 dB and 0.6 deg respectively compared to the state-of-the-art designs reported in the literature. The measured fractional bandwidth is 83%.