Compact Corporate Power DividerUsing Metamaterial NRI-TLCoupled-Line Couplers

A low-loss, planar and compact metamaterial 1:4 corporate power divider design is presented. The power divider uses a cascade of three microstrip/negative-refractive-index transmission-line coupled-line couplers allowing it to be compact in the longitudinal direction. The fabricated prototype operates at 2.10 GHz and is 11.6 cm wide-designed for feeding a four-element patch antenna array. The 3 dB transmission bandwidth ranges from 0.73 GHz to 0.46 GHz for the various ports with a total insertion loss of 1.1 dB, good phase balance and better than 20 dB isolation among the output ports.