Design of a 7-Way Microstrip Divider for a Hexagonal Honeycomb Structure

Euibum Lee,Hyunchul Ku

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2986763

Abstract

This paper proposes a 7-way microstrip divider for hexagonal honeycomb structures. The honeycomb arrangement has advantages such as equidistant adjacent output ports and high space utilization. The structure comprises six output ports arranged hexagonally and one output port placed at the center of the hexagon in the same plane. To design such a divider considering the output ports' positions, this paper proposes the combination of a microstrip 6:1 unequal Wilkinson divider and a 6-way microstrip divider. To facilitate the implementation of the 6:1 unequal divider, including a transmission line with a high characteristic impedance, a microstrip coupler is used, and for the 6-way microstrip divider, a design scheme and analysis considering the impedance matching and isolation of the output ports are presented. Moreover, the ground layers of the two microstrip dividers are constructed in a back-to-back structure to minimize the size of the overall divider. For validation, a 5.8 GHz 7-way divider is designed, implemented, and measured. The measured S-parameters show that the proposed 7-way divider has appropriate return loss, insertion loss, isolation, and power distribution with a phase difference under 4.7°.

Highlights

Advanced microwave technologies, such as a phased array antenna are being employed in military radars and in most wireless systems
The proposed divider comprises a 6:1 unequal Wilkinson divider and a 6-way scattering structure divider implemented in a back-to-back microstrip line structure with a common ground
A coupled line is used to replace the high impedance transmission line in the uneven Wilkinson divider, which is difficult to fabricate with the conventional microstrip line

Summary

Introduction

Advanced microwave technologies, such as a phased array antenna are being employed in military radars and in most wireless systems (communications [1], [2], wireless power charging [3]). The hexagonal lattice arrangement has excellent advantages, such as optimum structural space utilization and few grating lobes, because all the adjacent antenna elements can be placed equidistantly [4]. To implement such an array structure, it is important to divide the microwave signal into n-ways by appropriately considering the location of the output ports. An n-way divider can be implemented in two representative forms: a tree structure in which a reference signal is divided gradually through consecutive trees [5], [6]

Methods

Conclusion