Summary: | Recently, communication networks are evolving dramatically to meet the human dynamic needs as well as provide the required support for the massive expansion in future applications. This fosters the research in the mm-wave components to create a new infrastructure for these applications. As a result, the electrical characteristics of the designed components in terms of the bandwidth and the linearity have to be evaluated in an accurate way. The linearity of the mm-wave components is evaluated through the assessment of the inter-modulation of these components, especially at the second harmonic band. In this paper, a -17-dB harmonic coupler is designed to pick a strong sample at the second harmonic, while suppressing the fundamental signal at the coupled port. A design procedure for the proposed harmonic coupler is presented and illustrated. The fabricated unit is silver plated to minimize the losses, where the measured coupling at the second harmonic band shows an excellent agreement with the simulated ones. In addition, the measured coupling level at the fundamental band is below -75 dB.
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