Low-Loss 16-Way Ultra-Wideband Wilkinson Power Divider

Several power divider designs exist in the literature and are also commercially available. However, these dividers are not wideband. In this paper, a low-loss, ultra-wideband (UWB) 16-way power divider for UWB applications is presented. Notably, the design employs 15 cascaded multi-stage Wilkinson power dividers with a total of 90, 0402 package surface mounted chip resistors to enable operation from 0.2 to 3.6 GHz. Remarkably, the fabricated prototype achieves an 18:1 input and output impedance bandwidth with VSWR<1.2 thanks to an optimization approach that eliminates any additive reflection from each of the power division stages. In addition, the maximum insertion loss is 3 dB at the highest frequency of operation, while the maximum phase imbalance between output ports is 4 degrees. The measurements show excellent agreement with the simulations.