4-way Power Combiner Research Articles

Design and analysis of a broadband 4‐way high power combiner in the VHF/UHF band

In this study, a four-way power combiner using four equally designed 2-way power combiners is introduced. The physical structure of the combiner is such that the components and connections are symmetrically arranged. In the final section of the power combiner, two 2-way combiners are connected in parallel, which helps for easier circuit alignment and better electrical properties. The 2-way power combiner is the building block of the 4-way power combiner. The 2-way power combiner is analysed by even and odd method and its performance is verified by measurements. The analysis method can be extended to 4-way or N -way power combiners. The proposed 4-way power combiner is fabricated and its performance is measured. The amplitude imbalance of the 4-way power combiner is <;0.2 dB in the path between the input ports and the summing port. The attenuation above the theoretical 6 dB insertion loss is 0.5 dB from 30 to 500 MHz. The 4-way power combiner has the same performance as the 2-way power combiner, regarding the added insertion loss above the theoretical ideal value. Ease of fabrication, simple circuit connections and use of equally constructed 2-way power combiners result in repeatability and reduce electrical mismatch.

A 26.8 dB Gain 19.7 dBm CMOS Power Amplifier Using 4-way Hybrid Coupling Combiner

This letter presents a novel compact 4-way hybrid coupling combiner applied in an mm-wave CMOS power amplifier (PA) design with wideband, large output power and high gain. Basing on the principle of both series and parallel combination concurrently working in a concentric distributed active transformer, the size of a 4-way power combiner can be dramatically reduced. Using the proposed power combiner, a four-stage common source PA is implemented in 65 nm CMOS process. In each stage, inductive source degeneration is employed to enhance transistor stability without reducing maximum stable gain. The measurement results show that the PA can offer 26.8 dB linear gain with 3 dB bandwidth of 51-67 GHz. At 1.2 V/1.4 V external supply voltage, the PA is able to deliver 17.5 dBm/19.7 dBm Psat with 10.3%/13.4% power added efficiency (PAE). The chip size of the PA is only 0.32 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

E-band transformer-based differential 4-way power-combining amplifier

This article presents the design and implementation of a differential 4-way power-combining amplifier operating at E-band. The proposed 4-way power combiner facilitates short interconnects to the power amplifier (PA) cells, thereby resulting in reduced loss. Simple C-L-C and L-C networks are deployed to compensate inductive loading due to the routing lines that would otherwise introduce mismatch and subsequently increase overall loss. Realized in SiGe technology, the PA prototype delivered 13.2 dBm output-referred 1-dB compression point and 14.3 dBm saturated output power when operated from a single 3.3 V DC supply at 75 GHz. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:1764–1770, 2014