Unbalanced Two-Way Filtering Power Splitter for Wireless Communication Systems

• Main Authors: Augustine O. Nwajana, Gerald K. Ijemaru, Kenneth L.-M. Ang, Jasmine K. P. Seng, Kenneth S. K. Yeo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: unequal power divider/combiner; bandpass/channel filter; 3 dB power splitter; hairpin resonator; microstrip; square open-loop resonator
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/5/617

A compact unbalanced two-way filtering power splitter with an integrated Chebyshev filtering function is presented. The design is purely based on formulations, thereby eliminating the constant need for developing complex optimization algorithms and tuning, to deliver the desired amount of power at each of the two output ports. To achieve miniaturization, a common square open-loop resonator (SOLR) is used to distribute energy between the two integrated channel filters. In addition to distributing energy, the common resonator also contributes one pole to each integrated channel filter, hence, reducing the number of individual resonating elements used in achieving the integrated filtering power splitter (FPS). To demonstrate the proposed design technique, a prototype FPS centered at 2.6 GHz with a 3 dB fractional bandwidth of 3% is designed and simulated. The circuit model and layout results show good performances of high selectivity, less than 1.7 dB insertion loss, and better than 16 dB in-band return loss. The common microstrip SOLR and the microstrip hair-pin resonators used in implementing the proposed integrated FPS ensures that an overall compact size of 0.34 λg × 0.11 λg was achieved, where λg is the guided-wavelength of the 50 Ω microstrip line at the fundamental resonant frequency of the FPS passband.