Design and Development of Compact Wilkinson Power Divider on Gallium Nitride Coplanar Technology

Abstract

In this article, an ultra-compact monolithic microwave integrated Wilkinson power divider (WPD) was accomplished for X-band applications. So as to reduce the size of the design, the miniaturization technique was illustrated with the theoretical analysis. After the theoretical analysis, the layout of the design and electromagnetic simulation were performed. The proposed Wilkinson power divider was manufactured with utilizing gallium nitride integrated passive device technology. In the measurement results, it was seen that the input and output (I/O) reflection coefficients were better than -15 dB in the frequency bandwidth of 8-12 GHz. In addition, the insertion loss was measured less than -4 dB in the X-band (8-12 GHz). Moreover, the 15-dB fractional bandwidth is 40% and the isolation between the outputs are better than -15 dB. The size of the proposed Wilkinson power was reduced to the dimensions of 700 m  700 m (0.047 λg x 0.047 λg, where λg is the wavelength value at the center frequency (10 GHz)), as 𝜋-type miniaturization technique was employed with monolithic lumped components. Beside its miniaturized size, the proposed power divider exhibits broadband characteristics while having any degradation in the electrical performance.