A Thin-film Resistor Model for Millimeter-wave Wilkinson Power Divider

This work provides a rather rigorous design of the Wilkinson power divider (WPD) based on a thin-film resistor (TFR). The isolation section modeled initially as a resistance between two similar transmission lines (TLs) sections generates an error and optimization is necessary to achieve the optimal performance. The TFR modelization based on n small sections is more adequate and more coherent with physical behavior and process. This work shows that dividing the TFR into multiple sections gives closer results to full wave model ones. Correction factors are proposed and estimated to correct the resistor value and total phase conserving the usability of the standard equations. The operations presented using full-wave simulations and measurements of the manufactured prototypes including WPD at Ka-band show better results, particularly in terms of isolation covering 26% of bandwidth.