Synthesis of Broadband Symmetric Binary Power Dividers

This paper describes the synthesis of broadband symmetric binary power dividing trees. The synthesis is made with the even and odd modes. The different modes are optimized together with the isolating resistances as variables. The synthesis is done by a minimization of the absolute value of the reflection coefficient for each mode at different frequencies. The synthesis is continued until the specified ripple level is reached for one of the matching curves. The other curves are better matched. A large number of 4,8, and 16 way power dividers have been synthesized with SWR = 1.2, 1.1, 1.05 and with up to 16 quarter wave transformers in the even mode. A 4 way divider with 7 transformers in the even mode and 3 isolating resistors in each odd mode has been built with the center frequency 5 GHz. The total bandwidth (fmax/fmin) of the whole divider, 4.5, was measured to 4.1.