IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO.

8, AUGUST 2005

521

A Novel Rat Race Coupler Design for Dual-Band Applications

Kwok-Keung M. Cheng, Senior Member, IEEE, and Fai-Leung Wong, Student Member, IEEE
AbstractThis letter presents a novel and compact rat-race coupler design that can operate at two widely separated frequency bands. It is accomplished by modifying the length and impedance of the branch lines in the conventional structure, and the insertion of two additional shunt stubs. The proposed circuit also features planar structure and low insertion loss. For verication, the measured performance of a microstrip coupler operating at 900/2000 MHz are shown. Index TermsCouplers, dual band, microwave circuits.

I. INTRODUCTION

AT-RACE coupler is one of the passive circuits that are widely used in microwave and millimeter-wave applications. This device offers both in-phase and anti-phase relationship at the designated outputs with equal power splitting, as well as perfect isolation between the two input ports. Rat-race coupler is widely employed in the design of balanced mixers for obtaining good spurious signal rejection. However, due to the inherent narrow-band nature of the traditional design, its application to wide-band and multiband systems is thus limited. In the past years, research was mainly focused on bandwidth expansion [1][3] and size reduction [4], [5] techniques. In this work, a novel, planar, rat-race coupler design suitable for dual-band operation is presented with explicit design formulas. The proposed circuit also features compact layout and low insertion loss performance. For demonstration, the experimental results of a 900/2000-MHz rat race coupler implemented using microstrip is included. II. PROPOSED DUAL-BAND COUPLER DESIGN Fig. 1 shows the basic conguration of the proposed dualband coupler, where and are the centre frequencies of the lower and upper bands. In compared to the conventional design, the major differences are the electrical length of the longer arm (equals to 450 evaluated at the average value of and ); the branch-line impedance values (not 70.7 ); and the inclusion of two additional shunt stubs with short-circuit termination.

Fig. 1. Proposed dual-band coupler structure.

For the derivation of the branch-line impedance values, the even- and odd-mode analysis (Fig. 2) is applied in conjunction with the input-output relationship (magnitude and phase) of race-race coupler (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Subsequently, a general design requirement for the proposed conguration may there be formulated as (6) (7) (8) (9)

Manuscript received February 8, 2005; revised March 30, 2005. The review of this letter was arranged by Associate Editor J.-G. Ma. The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong (e-mail: kkcheng@ee.cuhk.edu.hk). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LMWC.2005.852792

Note that , , and are the electrical lengths of the corresponding branch-lines evaluated at the two operating frequencies ( & ), where (11)

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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO. 8, AUGUST 2005

Fig. 4. Measured return loss and port isolation.

Fig. 2. Even- and odd-mode topologies.

Fig. 5.

Measured insertion loss (in-phase outputs).

Fig. 3. Variation of line impedance versus frequency ratio.

From the above equations, one can deduce that a possible solution for dual-band operation is simply given by (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) Fig. 3 shows the computed impedance variation as a func. However, due to the praction of the frequency ratio tical limit of impedance realization (30100 typically), these curves suggested that the operating frequency of the proposed (the theoretcoupler is in the range of ). ical limit is III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS For verication, a dual-band micro-strip rat-race coupler operating at 900 and 2000 MHz was designed by (15)(18) and
Fig. 7. Measured insertion loss (anti-phase outputs). Fig. 6. Measured phase response (in-phase outputs).

validated using a circuit simulator. The optimum values of , , and were found to be approximately 44 , 52 , 52 and 40 , respectively. For experimental demonstration, a prototype (Fig. 9) was constructed using Duriod substrate with dielectric constant of 3.38 and thickness of 0.8 mm. Scattering parameter measurements were performed using HP8510C network analyzer over the frequency range from 0.1 to 4 GHz. Fig. 48 shows the

CHENG AND WONG: NOVEL RAT RACE COUPLER DESIGN

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TABLE I MEASURED PERFORMANCE OF RAT-RACE COUPLER

Fig. 8.

Measured phase response (anti-phase outputs).

(including connector losses) was found to be at most 0.7 dB higher than the loss-less case. The operating bandwidth of the coupler is governed by the amplitude and phase mismatch requirement to around 50 MHz. IV. CONCLUSION A new, compact, planar, rat race coupler design for dual-band operation has been presented and experimentally veried. A prototype implemented using microstrip has been constructed and characterized with excellent measurement results. Dual-band coupler design with much wider bandwidth and band separation is under development. REFERENCES
[1] D. Kim and Y. Naito, Broad-band design of improved hybrid-ring 3 dB directional coupler, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 82, no. 11, pp. 20402046, Nov. 1982. [2] C.-H. Ho, L. Fan, and K. Chang, Broad-band uniplanar hybrid-ring and branch-line couplers, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 41, no. 12, pp. 21162125, Dec. 1993. [3] H. Okabe, C. Caloz, and T. Itoh, A compact enhanced-bandwidth hybrid ring using a left-handed transmission line section, in IEEE MTT-S Int. Symp. Dig., Jun. 2003, pp. 329332. [4] T. Hirota, A. Minakawa, and M. Muraguchi, Reduced-size branch-line and rat-race hybrids for uniplanar MMICs, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 270275, Mar. 1990. [5] R. K. Settaluri, G. Sundberg, A. Weisshaar, and V. K. Tripathi, Compact folded line rat-race hybrid couplers, IEEE Microw. Guided Wave Lett., vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 6163, Feb. 2000.

Fig. 9.

Fabricated dual-band rat race coupler.

measured performance of the coupler in which the center frequencies of the two operating bands were found to be slightly shifted to 880 MHz and 1980 MHz. Table I gives the overall performance of the coupler measured at the two center frequencies. Return loss and port isolation of better than 28 dB were observed. Moreover, the insertion loss