10 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO.

1, JANUARY 2013

Dual-Band Unequal-Power Quadrature Branch-Line

Coupler With Coupled Lines
Chun-Han Yu and Yi-Hsin Pang, Member, IEEE

AbstractA planar dual-band quadrature branch-line coupler

with coupled lines is presented in this letter. The quarter-wave-
length transformers in a conventional branch-line coupler are re-
placed by coupled lines. With derived explicit design formula, the
proposed branch-line coupler can not only be operated at two arbi-
trary frequencies, but it can also exhibit the required output power
ratio at the designed dual frequencies. The measured return losses
and isolation are all better than 16 dB at the operating frequencies.
Phase imbalance less than 1 is obtained. The measured data vali-
date the proposed design methodology, and show good agreement
with the simulation results.
Index TermsBranch-line coupler, coupled line, dual-band, un-
equal-power.

Fig. 1. Proposed dual-band 90 branch-line coupler.

I. INTRODUCTION
A quadrature hybrid has been extensively used in mi-
crowave applications and wireless communications,
such as phase shifter, power divider or combiner, and Butler
matrix. The conventional branch-line coupler consists of
four quarter-wavelength transmission-line sections of
designated characteristic impedances. Recently, due to the
advances of wireless communications, the requirement of
multi-band technology has been growing rapidly. In [1], a
dual-band branch-line coupler was obtained by replacing the
conventional microstrip transformers with composite
right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission lines. Additional
unit-impedance stubs or stepped-impedance-stub lines have
been employed for dual-band operation [2], [3]. By replacing
the transformers of a conventional branch-line coupler
with stepped-impedance sections along with shunt open stubs,
a miniaturized dual-band branch-line coupler with arbitrary
power ratio was obtained [4]. Coupled lines have been found
their applications in power divider and couplers [5][7]. Two
dual-band compact 90 branch-line couplers were achieved by
changing the transmission-line sections with coupled lines [6],
[7]. A tri-band branch-line coupler has also been proposed by
utilizing a matching circuit at each port [8]. Recently, multiple
shunt open-circuited and short-circuited stubs are used for a
quad-band branch-line coupler [9].
Manuscript received July 06, 2012; revised November 08, 2012; accepted
December 03, 2012. Date of publication December 24, 2012; date of current
version January 16, 2013. This work was supported in part by the National Sci-
ence Council of Taiwan under Grant NSC 99-2221-E-390-018.
C.-H. Yu is with the Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering,
National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail:
Q36014594@mail.ncku.edu.tw).
Y.-H. Pang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Uni-
versity of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung 811, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail: yhpang@nuk.
edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2012.2234087
By changing the transmission-line sections in [7] with cou-
pled lines, the proposed circuit is obtained. Although the same
branch-line coupler structure has been presented in [10], the
coupler in [10] was designed to have equal power division and
realized by stepped-impedance coupled lines. In this letter, a
complete and new design procedure is proposed, and the branch-
line coupler is designed to have unequal power ratio. Compared
with most of dual-band branch-line couplers, especially those
with coupled lines, the proposed design exhibits arbitrary output
power ratio.
II. ANALYSIS AND DESIGN METHODOLOGY
Fig. 1 shows the proposed dual-band branch-line coupler. It
consists of four coupled lines. Each coupled line is in a form
that two coupled microstrip lines of equal length are connected
at one end. The coupled line between Port 1 and Port 2 has
the same even-mode characteristic admittance , odd-mode
characteristic admittance , and electrical length at the
frequency as the coupled line between Port 3 and Port 4
does. Similarly, the other pairs of coupled lines have the same
even mode characteristic admittance , odd-mode character-
istic admittance , and electrical length at the frequency
. Since the 90 branch-line coupler is a symmetric structure,
the even-odd mode analysis can be applied. In the following
analysis, is the characteristic admittance of each port. For
simplicity, even-mode and odd-mode electrical lengths of the
coupled lines are assumed to be equal.
This two-fold symmetrical structure can be analyzed by using
the two symmetry planes and as shown in Fig. 1.
The even-odd mode analysis of this structure can be utilized by
four identical one-port sections along the two symmetry planes
correspondingly to four characteristic excitations [6]. Using the
even-odd mode analysis with the requirements ,
the following design equations can be obtained [7]:
(1a)

1531-1309/$31.00 2012 IEEE

YU AND PANG: DUAL-BAND UNEQUAL-POWER QUADRATURE BRANCH-LINE COUPLER WITH COUPLED LINES 11

Fig. 4. Measured and simulated parameters of the dual-band unequal-power

branch-line coupler operated at 2.45 GHz and 6.17 GHz.

Fig. 2. (a) Coupled line impedances and electrical length versus frequency
ratio ; (b) coupled line impedances and electrical length versus
power-split ratio .

Fig. 5. Phase difference between Port 2 and Port 3 of the design.

TABLE I
Fig. 3. Layout and photograph of the proposed dual-band unequal-power-ratio COMPARISON BETWEEN SIMULATION AND MEASUREMENT RESULTS
branch-line coupler. , , ,
, , .

(1b)
(1c)

where and is the output power ratio between

Port 3 and Port 2. For the compact-size consideration, the elec-
trical lengths and are positive and less than 90 . The above
equations must be satisfied at the operating frequencies and
, where is the frequency ratio .
Define two auxiliary variables and
. The following equations can then be derived from
(1a)(1c): (2b)

(2c)
(2a) (2d)
12 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013

TABLE II ious frequency ratio and power-split ratio at different

BANDWIDTH (%) OF THE DUAL-BAND BRANCH-LINE COUPLERS
TABLE III
COMPARISON OF MULTIBAND BRANCH LINE COUPLERS
design parameter . A dual-band branch-line coupler with
unequal output power operated at frequencies
and has been designed
and implemented. Choosing , the electrical length
is obtained. The even- and odd-mode characteristic
impedances are calculated as , ,
, and . For verification, this
dual-band branch-line coupler has been fabricated on a Rogers
RO4003C substrate with a dielectric constant of 3.55, thickness
of 0.508 mm, and a loss tangent of 0.0027. The layout and
photograph of the designed branch-line coupler are shown in
Fig. 3. The fabricated circuit fits in an area around 23.6 mm
21.8 mm.
Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 depict the measured and simulated S pa-
rameters and phase difference respectively. Circuit simulation
and full-wave simulation results are consistent with each other.
Table I and Table II summarize the simulated and measured
data. Table III compares the performance of this work with other
multiband branch-line couplers. Table III shows that the pro-
posed coupler exhibits good amplitude and phase imbalances.

IV. CONCLUSION
A planar unequal-power dual-band quadrature branch-line
coupler with coupled lines has been proposed in this letter.
Explicit design formulas and a step-by-step design procedure
are shown. The proposed coupler is designed to exhibit a
3 dB output power difference. Measured results are well in
agreement with simulated data.

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