Design and fabrication of a nonradiative dielectric waveguide circulator

A technique is described for constructing a high-performance nonradiative dielectric waveguide (NRD guide) circulator for use at 50 GHz. A mode suppressor, which serves to reduce unwanted modes to a negligible level, was devised and used to improve circulator performance significantly. A half-wavelength step transformer was installed at each port of the circulator to increase the operational bandwidth. The insertion loss of this circulator is less than 0.3 dB, and the 20-dB isolation bandwidth is about 2.6 GHz. Characteristics of the NRD guide circulator are analyzed based on an equivalent circuit representation. This analysis considerably facilitates the design procedure of the circulator