Dual-Band Branch-Line Coupler.pdfVIP

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 58, NO. 3, MARCH 2010 651 Dual-Band Branch-Line Coupler With Port Extensions Hyunchul Kim, Byungje Lee, Member, IEEE, and Myun-Joo Park Abstract—A new branch-line coupler structure with port exten- sions is proposed for the dual-band operation. The conventional branch-line coupler structure is adapted to the dual-band opera- tion by inserting a transmission line section at the input ports and modifying the branch parameters. The dual-band performance of the proposed coupler is verified theoretically through the rigorous microwave circuit analysis and the exact design equations are de- rived in concise form. The design, simulation, and measurement results validate the dual-band capability of the proposed coupler with the same quadrature phase relation between the two band fre- quencies. Index Terms—Branch-line coupler, dual band, quadrature hy- brid. I. INTRODUCTION T HE branch-line coupler is one of the most basic circuitcomponents in various fields of microwave engineering [1]. It is usually constructed using the quarter-wave transmis- sion line sections, which limit the coupler operation around a single frequency, apart from the spurious responses at the odd harmonic frequencies. Recently, several new schemes are developed for the branch- line couplers operating at two arbitrary frequencies. In [2], the left-handed transmission lines are employed in the branch-line coupler for the dual-band operation. The cross-coupled branch- line coupler in [3] attains the dual-band capability with the addi- tional cross-coupling branches. A suboptimal dual-band opera- tion of the branch-line coupler is reported in [4] with simple in- teger ratios between the branch lengths. This method is extended to multisection structures in [5] to improve the bandwidth. The use of stub lines is very popular in obtaining the dual-band oper- ation of the branch-line coupler [6]–[9]. The stub lines are em- ployed at the input ports [6]