An Ultraminiaturized Bandpass Filtering Marchand Balun Chip With Spiral Coupled Lines Based on GaAs Integrated Passive Device Technology

Abstract

The integrated passive device (IPD) technology has become a new research hotspot, and it depends on electrical characteristics of GaAs, NiCr, and Si3N4 to construct radio frequency (RF) components. RF elements constructed by the IPD technology have features of high quality and ultra-small size, especially for capacitors and inductors. In order to realize the miniaturization of RF circuits, dimensions become as small as possible. Consequently, the layout of a spiral coupled line (SCL) cannot be drawn freely, so that it has uncontrollable odd- and even-mode impedances and a large coupling coefficient, which may limit the design of the traditional Marchand balun negatively. This article solves this problem by designing a GaAs IPD Marchand balun with 1/8-wavelength coupled lines (CLs) and using a capacitor termination to replace the open end in the conventional Marchand balun. Meanwhile, a filter is added to realize a filtering function. The proposed bandpass filtering Marchand balun (BFMB) chip has a size of 1.49 mm $\times1.39$ mm, and measured results indicate that it has an operation band of 2.39–5.68 GHz with a phase imbalance of 5.26° and a magnitude imbalance of less than 0.35 dB.