Design of a Novel 16-Way Short Pulse Power Divider Based on Transmission Line Transformer

This article presents a 16-way short pulse power divider (PD) with the same input and output impedance based on the transmission line transformer (TLT) principle. Different from the traditional multi-channel PD composed of impedance tapered transmission lines and PDs in parallel structure, the novel 16-way PD is cascaded by multi-stages of series-parallel structure, which avoids the process of impedance transformer and improves the compactness of the device, as well as the transmission efficiency. It was composed of four stages of the novel series-parallel constructure converted from coaxial waveguide to microstrip line. And to control the energy dissipation, a unified ground of the output ports was built, and the short-ended metal shell was loaded between every stage. This 16-way PD was fabricated and measured. The measured return loss of the PD is less than -16 dB from 440 MHz to 6 GHz, and less than -10 dB from 270 MHz to 6 GHz. The measured peak gain is more than 0.83 when input by a Gaussian pulse with tFWHM = 250 ps (FWHM: full-width half maximum).