Integrated broadband lumped-element symmetrical-hybrid N-way power dividers

This paper presents a monolithically-integrated, broadband, lumped-element, symmetrical-hybrid power divider centered at 20GHz which was designed and fabricated to uniformly distribute power to arrays of Josephson junctions for superconducting voltage standards. This solution achieves a ten-fold decrease in chip area, and a two-fold increase in bandwidth when compared to a standard distributed 180°-hybrid by utilizing LC Π sections and a coplanar-waveguide phase inverter instead of transmission lines. A single divider demonstrates 0.5 dB maximum insertion loss, and a 1.5:1 VSWR bandwidth of 13–23 GHz. An eight-way, three-level, binary, power divider network is characterized in a divider/attenuator/combiner back-to-back measurement configuration with a 20 dB match bandwidth from 11.5–21.5 GHz. In the 15–22 GHz band of interest, the maximum insertion loss for the sixteen-way divider network is 1.0 dB, with an average of 0.5 dB.