Analysis and design of a novel coupled-line wideband Wilkinson power divider

This paper presents the design of a novel Wilkinson power divider for wideband applications. The proposed structure is composed of one coupled line with different even- and odd-mode characteristic impedance and a multi-stage λ/4 impedance transformer. Using rigorous even- and odd-mode analysis, the analytical design equations for this proposed power divider are obtained. To validate the analysis, dividers centered at 3 GHz with different number of impedance transformation stages N are simulated and a comparison is made between them. For ultra-wideband (UWB) application, the comparison result shows that N≥3 is needed, and a divider with N=3 is ultimately designed with the return loss better than -20 dB over 3.1-10.6 GHz range.