A Novel Approach to Design an N-Way Unequal Polygon Power Divider

This paper proposes a novel approach to designing an N-way unequal polygon power divider. Unlike previously reported approaches, the proposed approach precisely determines the specified characteristic impedance and dimensions of each transmission line in the polygon power divider to provide its desired response across its operating frequency band. The innovation of this approach lies in utilizing ABCD matrices instead of traditional even-odd decomposition techniques (which become complex when having a large number of output ports) or optimization algorithms commonly used in prior work. The proposed approach is versatile and can be applied to design any polygon divider, regardless of whether its output power levels are equal or unequal, the parity of its number of ports (odd or even), or the total number of ports (few or many). To validate this approach, two examples were analyzed through simulations, fabrication, and measurements: one with an odd number of output ports (7 ports) and another with an even number (6 ports). As a practical application of the proposed method, the 7-port polygon divider was extended to form a 7-element linear antenna array with low sidelobe levels. The generic methodology introduced by this approach, combined with the validated examples, demonstrates its suitability and effectiveness for designing polygon power dividers across various configurations.