A new planar artificial transmission line and its applications to a miniaturized butler matrix

A miniaturized quadrature hybrid coupler, a rat-race coupler, and a 4 x 4 Butler matrix based on a newly proposed planar artificial transmission line are presented in this paper for application in ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems. This planar artificial transmission line is composed of microstrip quasi-lumped elements and their discontinuities and is capable of synthesizing microstrip lines with various characteristic impedances and electrical lengths. At the center frequency of the UHF RFID system, the occupied sizes of the proposed quadrature hybrid and rat-race couplers are merely 27% and 9% of those of the conventional designs. The miniaturized couplers demonstrate well-behaved wideband responses with no spurious harmonics up to two octaves. The measured results reveal excellent agreement with the simulations. Additionally, a 4 x 4 Butler matrix, which may occupy a large amount of circuit area in conventional designs has been successfully miniaturized with the help of the proposed artificial transmission line. The circuit size of the Butler matrix is merely 21% of that of a conventional design. The experimental results show that the proposed Butler matrix features good phase control, nearly equal power splitting, and compact size and is therefore applicable to the reader modules in various RFID systems.