Miniaturized Grounded Co-planar Waveguide Based X-Band Equal Split Wilkinson Power Divider for AESA Application

Abstract

Wilkinson Power Divider is extensively used in the development of RF-Front End of AESA Radar. Significant work has been done to design Wilkinson power dividers (WPD) to feed sub-arrays of radars for beam-forming application. Many topologies have already been proposed in the literature to reduce the physical dimensions of the divider and to improve its fractional bandwidth, but grounded co-planar waveguide is not exploited. The selection of transmission line technology for the realization of any design has severe impact on the performance of the circuitry. Micro-strip technology is most commonly used in the design of passive components due to ease of fabrication. However, transmission lines suffer from conductor, dielectric, dispersion and radiation losses. Moreover, micro-strip transmission lines greatly suffer from radiation losses at higher frequencies. To address radiation issue, Grounded Co-Planar Waveguide is employed, that significantly mitigates radiation losses. In this paper, an X-band Wilkinson power divider from 8 GHz to 11 GHz is realized on RT Duroid 6002 employing micro-strip transmission lines and grounded co-planar waveguide for comparison of performance. WPD was modelled and thorough simulations were performed in ANSYS HFSS. The results indicated that the dimensions of physical layout were greatly reduced and fractional bandwidth was significantly enhanced.