Size-Reduced Rectangular Patch Hybrid Coupler Using Patterned Ground Plane

This paper presents, for the first time, the design of a size-reduced rectangular patch hybrid coupler. Different types of compact rectangular patch hybrid couplers with different ground plane patterns are described. For demonstration, two compact rectangular patch hybrid couplers are designed to operate at 3.5 GHz. They are measured to have 30.1% and 33.3% bandwidth with 67.3% and 72.3% size reduction compared with the optimized one without patterned ground plane.