IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 57, NO.

1, JANUARY 2009 149

Miniaturized Dual-Band Hybrid Couplers

With Arbitrary Power Division Ratios
Ching-Luh Hsu, Jen-Tsai Kuo, Senior Member, IEEE, and Chin-Wei Chang

Abstract—Branch-line and rat-race couplers are designed to of a section in a conventional hybrid for dual-band purpose.
have dual-band operation with arbitrary power division ratios. The design is based on the equivalence of the matrices
An elementary two-port is proposed to imitate the 90 section of the two elementary two-ports at the two designated frequen-
at the two designated frequencies with different characteristic
impedances. The two-port consists of a stepped-impedance section cies. The cross-coupled [5] and the three structures in [6] can
with open stubs attached to its two ends, and its circuit parameters also be used to implement dual-band quadrature couplers. In [7],
are determined by the transmission line theory. The use of the a hybrid-ring loaded with two identical short-circuited stubs is
stepped-impedance sections also leads to circuit miniaturization. proposed to realize the dual-band performance. In [8], a rat-race
By the standard microstrip technology, investigated also includes coupler operating at two widely separated frequencies is devised
the realizable power division ratios and circuit bandwidths in
the two bands, the upper limit of the ratio of the two designated with a compact size and low insertion loss.
frequencies and the miniaturization factor of the proposed circuit. It has been shown in [9]–[12] that hybrid couplers may have
Hybrid couplers operating at 2.45/5.2 GHz with various power arbitrary output power division by controlling the characteristic
division ratios are designed, fabricated and tested. Experiment impedances of the sections. The purpose of this paper is
results are compared with the theory and simulation. to extend their formulations to develop dual-band branch-line
Index Terms—Branch-line coupler, dual band, miniaturization, and rat-race couplers with arbitrary power divisions at the two
rat-race coupler, stepped impedance. designated bands. These couplers will be useful for dual-band
mixers and antenna arrays.
I. INTRODUCTION For rat-race and branch-line couplers, miniaturization is of
particular interest since the conventional circuits has a circum-
ESIGN OF multiband RF circuits has become an impor-
D tant research topic due to recent rapid development of mo-
bile and wireless communications. Existing examples of dual-
ference of or . Multifolded traces [13] and fractal-line
sections [14] and patterned ground structures [15] are possible
ways to miniaturize the circuits. In [16], the area reduction is
band systems include the GSM 900/1800 cellular phone and the achieved by line sections loaded with several equally separated
802.11a/b wireless local area network (WLAN). For saving cost, open stubs. In [17], a periodic stepped-impedance ring is de-
multiband components are usually required in the RF parts of signed to shrink the size of a rat-race coupler by more than 75%.
these systems. Obviously, a single circuit operating at multiple In [18], the dual-band 2.45/5.2 GHz rat-race coupler with equal
bands is of particular interest since it uses a smaller circuit area power division uses only 21% of the area of a conventional cir-
and possibly possesses lower insertion loss. cuit at the first band. The circuits proposed here also provide
Hybrid couplers are one of the most important passive mi- good size reduction factors, and this will be discussed latter.
crowave devices. In the past, several approaches have been pro- This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, design equa-
posed for design of dual-band hybrid couplers [1]–[8]. In [1] tions for single-band hybrid couplers with arbitrary power di-
and [2], the quarter-wave sections of the conventional vision are briefly reviewed. These equations are extended in
coupler are replaced by composite right/left-handed transmis- Section III to perform the dual-band operation. Design graphs
sion lines. In their realization, however, significant losses are for such dual-band branch-line and rat-race couplers are demon-
caused by the lumped elements and via-holes in the assembly strated in Sections IV and V, respectively. The constraint of the
of left-handed transmission lines. In [3] and [4], a straight line design imposed by the line width resolution in microstrip real-
section loaded with a shunt element is proposed to play the role ization is also investigated. Measurement and simulation results
of some experimental circuits are presented in Sections VI, and
Manuscript received February 11, 2008; revised October 02, 2008. First pub- a conclusion is drawn in VII.
lished December 12, 2008; current version published January 08, 2009. This
work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education under the ATU Program
and by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 95-2752-E-009- II. HYBRID COUPLERS WITH ARBITRARY POWER
003-PAE, Grant NSC 95-2221-E-009-037-MY2, and Grant NSC 96-2221-E-
009-245. DIVISION FOR SINGLE-BAND OPERATION
C.-L. Hsu was with Department of Communication Engineering, National
Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300 Taiwan. He is now with the Department of Fig. 1 shows the circuit schematics of the two hybrid cou-
Electronic Engineering, Ta Hwa Institute of Technology, Hsinchu, 307 Taiwan. plers with arbitrary power division. For a branch-line hybrid
J.-T. Kuo and C.-W. Chang are with the Department of Communication Engi- with and , the charac-
neering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300 Taiwan (e-mail: jtkuo@
mail.nctu.edu.tw). teristic impedances and are given as [10], [11]
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMTT.2008.2009036
(1)

0018-9480/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE

150 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 57, NO. 1, JANUARY 2009

Fig. 2. Elementary two-port for design of dual-band hybrids.

Fig. 1. Circuit schematics of: (a) branch-line coupler and (b) rat-race coupler
with arbitrary power division for single-band operation. facilitate the derivation of the -matrix of the two-port in Fig. 2,
one can utilize the symmetry of the network [18]. If the imitated
characteristic impedances at and are, respectively,
and , one can validate that
(2)
(8a)
where is the system impedance. The rat-race ring in Fig. 1(b)
has six sections with alternative characteristic impedances (8b)
and to achieve an arbitrary power division [12]. The
power division ratio is dB
where
and is related to and by
(8c)
(3)
(8d)
In synthesis, when the power division is given,
and can be expressed as and and are evaluated at . The functions and
are directly related to the input admittances of the net-
(4) work in Fig. 2 when its symmetric plane is open and short cir-
cuited, respectively. Enforcing the diagonal terms of the -ma-
(5) trix of the two-port to zero, we have the shunt susceptance

(6) (9)

Since both the hybrids in Fig. 1 are closed structures, the two
One can see from (1) and (2) for the branch-line coupler and (4)– shunt susceptances at each impedance junction can be merged
(6) for the rat-race coupler, that once (or ) is given, there is together and implemented by a single open stub. Let be the
no degree of freedom in choosing the design parameters for the length at and be the characteristic impedance of the stub.
circuits in Fig. 1. Then the susceptances of the stub at and are
and . For branch-line couplers, the length can be
III. ELEMENTARY TWO-PORT FOR DUAL-BAND OPERATION obtained by [18]

Both the hybrids in Fig. 1 consist of several sections at (10)

the design frequency. The admittance matrix of such a section
with characteristic impedance can be written as
where the subscripts and denote the shunt susceptances for
imitating the sections with and in Fig. 1(a), respec-
tively. The characteristic impedance of the stub can then be
(7)
calculated by

(11)
The elementary two-port in Fig. 2 is proposed to imitate the
sections to our purpose. It consists of two identical high-
For the dual-band rat-race coupler, the characteristic imped-
segments on both sides and a low- segment in the middle.
ances and and the shunt susceptance can be determined
In addition, two shunt elements are attached to the ends of the
in a similar fashion. Given and the power division (in deci-
two-port. This two-port has to imitate an electric length of 90
bels) at and at , values of and can be known.
and different equivalent characteristic impedances at the two
Define
designated frequencies (denoted as , , and ) to
perform the dual-band operation. The design is as follows. Let
(12)
be the impedance ratio of the section. To