Design and Mathematical Analysis of Microstrip Bandpass Power Divider for Ku Band Communications

Many power dividers such as Wilkinson, Geysel, etc. are proposed to achieve wide bandwidth and the ideal value of insertion loss for N-way arrangement. These devices also perform filtering functions. Most of the power dividers are integrated with bandpass filters in order to suppress the harmonics. This paper presents the design of a novel power divider consisting of series and shunt microstrip stubs of quarter wavelength embedded on the output branches of the power divider thereby forming bandpass filters of the third order. The bandpass filters along with the power dividers not only perform the filtering function but also power division function. Embedding the higher-order bandpass filters in the branches of power divider heavily suppresses the harmonics. Overall dimensions of the proposed power divider are 19.1 x 13.25 x 1.524m³ including ground plane. The proposed power divider further possesses wide bandwidth of 3. 5GHz along with the insertion loss of-3.32dB at 14GHz. The proposed power divider and its equivalent lumped element model are analyzed mathematically. It is found that the mathematical analysis of the proposed power divider and its lumped equivalent model have good agreement with their simulation results.