M561: Power Dividers / Combiners

A power divider is ideally a lossless reciprocal device which can also perform vector summation of two or more signals and thus is sometimes called a power combiner or summer. Two forms of power dividers are generally constructed by cascading two-way dividers. These twoway dividers are typically either terminated 180° hybrid (for RF frequency units) or Wilkinson or tapered line dividing structures (for microwave frequency devices). Nway dividers are devices which split signals in ways that are not 2N. M/A-COM offers a variety of 3 way and other N-way dividers that incorporate proprietary and patented circuit designs.Although power dividers could be composed of 90° hybrids, the term "power divider" normally refers to a device that splits an input signal into two or more inphase outputs. The purpose of this article is to provide the designer with basic information describing the function of these devices and to define the performance parameters and trade-offs critical to specifying a power divider.