ARAB ACADEMY FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND

MARITIME TRANSPORT (AASTMT)

College of Engineering and Technology
Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering

Microwave Engineering
EC546

Branch Line Coupler 2 GHZ

Mohamed Adel Mokhtar 18104047

Mohamed Ashraf Essam
Ahmed Emad Elsamahy 18105637

Prepared For:

Dr.Sherif El-Diasty

2023
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
It has been a great opportunity to learn new experience in a real-life project development, followed
by the knowledge of all project development lifecycle including project definition, analysis, and
implementation. We want to thank everybody who made this possible to us and special thanks and
our deepest gratitude to our mentor and supervisor Dr.Sherif El-Diasty for the great efforts he did to
provide all required and useful information and making the path clear to us. Furthermore, we
appreciate our supervisor for his patience and guidance along the semester.

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 Abstract
Branch line coupler is a popular passive device for microwave and millimeter-wave
applications. The standard design of branch line coupler provides specific power dividing
ratio and phase relationship (depending on types of branch line coupler) between the output
ports at the operating frequency. Due to its power dividing and combining function, it's
commonly used as building blocks for balanced amplifier, mixer, etc. However, conventional
design of branch line coupler basically consists of quarter wavelength transmission lines
which lead to narrow band operation. As a result, its application to wide-band and multi-
band system is thus greatly limited. In past years, various reports concerning bandwidth
enhancement and size reduction techniques have been published in the literature. Recently,
dual band branch line coupler implemented by lumped elements was also reported. In this
thesis, two novel planar dual-band, 90° 3-dB branch line coupler designs are presented. Both
designs offer dual-band operation and low insertion loss. The first design is slightly smaller
than the conventional structure, while the second design uses only quarter-wavelength long
branch-lines, but with the insertion of shunt-stubs. Rigorous analysis of both design with
explicit design formulae are presented. Moreover, practical issues such as the branch-line
impedance realization, and effect of characteristic impedance deviation are also addressed.
Finally, for experimental verification, both the simulated and measured results of a 900/1800
M H z branch-line couplers constructed by microstrip technology are demonstrated.

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 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

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Branch line coupler is one of the passive components, which is commonly used in microwave
integrated circuits and R F measurement appliances. The fundamental features of branch line coupler
include coupling specific amount of power to coupling port at certain phase difference between
output ports, combining and dividing power at specific frequency band. There are many R F
applications involving branch line coupler, such as balanced amplifier, balanced mixer and
modulator. They are all providing competitive functionalities when comparing to similar applications
in single-end structure. However, due to the use of quarter wavelength transmission lines in the
standard design, the bandwidth is greatly limited. Specifically, if the bandwidth of operation is
defined as 1 dB output power mismatch between two output ports at the operating frequency, the
normalized bandwidth of a 90° 3-dB branch line coupler is about 10%. Such bandwidth can only
satisfy the requirement of narrow band applications. The size of branch line coupler is another
critical drawback. As the use of quarter wavelength transmission line, the dimension of a branch line
coupler is significantly large, and it would be even worse when it is designated to operate at lower
frequency band. For instance, the eventual size of the R F circuitry adopting branch line coupler is
probably greater than double to that of a single-end circuitry. Various research had been conducted to
study the method of improvement on the branch line coupler performance, probably bandwidth
enhancement and size reduction, of branch line coupler. A number of reports proposed different
broadband coupler designs by different technologies. However, either they are non-planar (requiring
external components) or they require further bonding process after fabrication, which is not
comparable to the conventional design to some extent. Relatively, the reported improvement on size
reduction of branch line coupler is more encouraging. Among this report, two of them propose a
small planar design of branch line coupler by artificial transmission line and inducing extra open
stubs. The two designs featured at smaller dimension, with ideally the same bandwidth performance
as that of conventional design. Apart from that, realization of branch line coupler by integrated
circuit technology is another bright solution in size reduction. In the designs of quadrature hybrid
using lumped elements are proposed, when the bandwidth of is even up to 50%. However, its
performance is severely limited by the parasitic effect from lumped elements. Recently, a dual band
branch line coupler was proposed using lumped elements. The coupler can operate at dual frequency
bands by replacing quarter wavelength transmission line with metamaterials formed by lumped
elements and transmission lines. Although it can be used in dual band application, again, the
performance is degraded because of the parasitic effect associated with the lumped element, and
fabrication cost is increased because of extra fabrication process for lumped elements. In fact, the
actual dimension of the circuit is even greater than the conventional design. In this thesis, two
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designs of dual band 90° 3-dB branch line coupler are proposed. Both of these two designs can be
fabricated by microstrip technology and the dimensions of the circuits are dramatically reduced.
However, the performance of the second design is significantly better than that of the first design in
terms of size reduction ratio and operating bandwidth. That design can be comparable to that of
standard design of 90° 3-dB branch line coupler too.

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 CHAPTER 2

Basic Theory of Branch Line

Coupler

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A branch line coupler, unlike other circuits, consists of four terminals and this can be regarded as a
four-port network. Introduction of four-port network and specifically, analysis of branch line coupler
will be shown in details in this chapter. Frequency response of the design is simulated and presented
in later part of this chapter for illustration.

2.1 Four-port network

Figure 2. 1 General four-port network

Fig2.1 shows a general four-port network with incident port, output port, coupling port and isolated
port. Let Pi be the input power to port 1 while P2, P3 and P4 are the power delivered to port 2，3
and 4 respectively. Power delivered to specific port with respect to input port, port 1 in this case, is
defined as coupling coefficient, C.

2.2 Even-odd mode analysis

Figure 2.2 Proposed design of quarter-wavelength transformer

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The topology of branch line coupler is shown in Figure 2-2. When all ports are connected to matched
load, the power input at port 1 (as an input port) will deliver to port 2 (output port) and port 3
(coupled port) equally with the phase difference of 90°. And there should be no power emerged at the
port 4 5 (isolated port). Thus, this coupler has the coupling coefficient of 3 dB and zero isolation. It's
not easy to analyze the behavior of branch line coupler by straightforward approach as the topology
of the 4-port network. Although there's transient analysis of four-port network reported in , using
ABC D manipulation under even-odd mode analysis is the typical method nowadays for symmetrical
network. Before applying even-odd mode analysis, there are some assumptions about the network:
• The network is symmetric,
• The network is lossless, and
• The ratio of wavelength to line is sufficiently large so junction discontinuity effect can be
neglected.
To proceed even-odd mode analysis, it's first to apply even mode excitation and odd mode excitation,
respectively. And superposing both results derived and the behavior of four-port network can be
determined

2.3 Simulation results

In order to have a better illustration on the behavior of branch line coupler, frequency responses of a
branch line coupler are demonstrated in Figure 2.3 to Figure 2.6. Simulation is performed by
Advanced Design System, ADS, by Agilent Technologies. In principle, a branch line coupler has
zero return loss and isolation loss. There are -3dB power output at both output port (S21) and
coupled port (S31) with the phase difference of 90°. It should be noted that output port power, S21, is
degraded faster than coupled port power, S31, along frequency changes from center frequency,
although they have the same power level at the operating frequency. Regarding the phase difference,
it shows that there's phase difference of 90° between signals of output port and coupled port
operating around the center frequency.

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 Figure 2.3: Simulation results: return loss

Figure 2.4: Simulation results: insertion loss

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 Figure 2.5: Simulation results: isolation

Figure 2.6: Simulation results: phase difference

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 CHAPTER 3

The Advanced Design System

(ADS)

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Since it is acknowledged that the conventional branch line coupler design suffers from large
dimension and narrow operating bandwidth, alternative solutions of branch line coupler based on
different circuit topologies and/ or implementation technologies have been reported. In this chapter,
several advanced designs with improved performance (reduced size, wider bandwidth) are compared
with the conventional design.

3.1 Broad-band uniplanar branch-line design

Figure 3-1: Transverse diagram of (a) microstripline and (b) coplanar waveguide

For bandwidth enhancement, coplanar waveguide as well as slotline ring may be used instead of
microstripline. There are better illustrations of the difference between microstripline and coplanar
waveguide in Figure 3-1. In the conventional design of branch line coupler, the electrical length of
transmission line is not 90° when the signal frequency is different from operating frequency. This
amplitude and phase performance will be deviated significantly and it limits the operating bandwidth.
In this design, the frequency response of the junction formed by coplanar waveguide and slotline is
less sensitive to frequency variation than that of microstripline and better phase and amplitude
performance would be resulted.
According to the measurement results, the bandwidth is improved to 4 0% when the amplitude
mismatch tolerance is as large as IdB. This is much better than that of the conventional branch line
coupler and it is well suitable to be adopted in monolithic integrated circuit. Nonetheless, the design
is including slotline structure and additional coplanar waveguide-to-slotline transition structures for
connection to other circuit components are necessary. This increases the difficulty as well as the cost
of operation.

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 CHAPTER 4

Design Equation

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4 Design Theory of Dual Band Branch Line Couplers
The use of branch line coupler in dual band applications is limited because of its narrow operating
bandwidth. Although there are several innovative wideband designs reported and some of them
successfully increase the bandwidth up to 50%, the performance is degraded comparing to that of
conventional design in terms of insertion loss, return loss and isolation. Despite the degraded
performance, these wideband designs are not well suited for dual band applications owing to the
following reasons,
1. Since most of dual band applications feature large frequency separation between two operating
frequencies, the bandwidth requirement of the wide band coupler is usually much higher than
50%. For instance, in order to use a wideband branch line coupler for a dual band application
operating at fundamental frequency and second harmonic, the operating bandwidth of the
coupler, with respect to the center frequency, is:

The case is even worse for some dual band applications with farer frequency separation.
2. These wideband branch line coupler designs provide a flat frequency response throughout the
operating bandwidth. It may cause hazard to some dual band applications when unwanted signal of
mid frequency band induces interferences to the operation. Suppression of mid-frequency band
signal is a favorable feature for dual band operation. Although there was proposed dual band branch
line coupler which was implemented by composite right/ left handed transmission lines [16], the
dimension is significantly larger than that of conventional design and the performance is degraded
because of parasitic effect from lumped elements. In this chapter, two designs of dual band branch
line coupler are proposed. Topology of each designs, mathematical analysis and design procedures
would be described in details. Afterwards, the comparison of two designs will be presented too at
the end of this chapter.

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4.1 Design 1 一 dual band branch line coupler with sub-optimum
performance

The conventional design of branch line coupler uses two pairs of quarter wavelength transmission
line with different characteristic impedances. Feasibility of branch line

coupler realization using different electrical lengths of transmission lines is reported in [25-26]. The
main objective of such realization is for ease of MI C and MMI C implementation. In design 1 in
Figure 4-1, the dual band branch line coupler consists of two pairs of transmission lines with
electrical length of——and——，respectively, at mid2 2 frequency where m and n are any integer.
With different values of m and n, frequency response of the configuration deviates from that of the
conventional design. In the text below, a completed analysis will be delivered in details so as to
derive the value of Zi and Z2 such that it can operate in dual frequency bands.

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4.1.1 Analysis and design

The following conditions should be adopted in the design of dual band branch line coupler:

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n and m are positive integers; zi and Z2 are normalized values (with reference to Zo);/； and/2 are
the center frequencies of the lower and upper bands. It is interesting to note that the various s-
parameters are also inter-related

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Practically, the proposed structure should also exhibit small input reflection, good port isolation and
low insertion loss. For further investigation, the simulated responses of the proposed coupler versus
fractional bandwidth are plotted in Figure 4-4. There are two different configurations for
consideration:
1. A(n=2, m =1), and

2. B(n=l, m=2)，

which are the smallest possible designs.

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It can be seen that, by the proper choice of n and m integers, these configurations offer sub-optimum
return loss (better than 20 dB) and insertion loss (less than 3.2 dB) over a fractional bandwidth
ranging from 0.2 to 0.43 (1.5/} < 2.5/；). Performance of the design in terms of insertion loss, return
loss and isolation loss among fractional bandwidth is shown in Figure 4-3.

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To sum up, the design procedures for the proposed coupler are given as follows:
1. Select suitable values for n and m based on the fractional bandwidth (6) calculated;
2. Determine the value of P by solving ( 4-5 ) numerically;
3. Compute the values of Z\ and Z2 using (4-6 ) and (4-7 ).
4.1.2 Size comparison
To have a better understanding on the size reduction ratio of the design, the size of proposed design
and conventional design operating at lower frequency band are compared in terms of perimeter and
area. The perimeter of conventional design is

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 CHAPTER 5

Simulation and Result

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5 Simulation Verification
Rigorous analysis of two dual band branch line coupler designs are presented in details. In this chapter,
computer simulations of two designs operating at 900MHz and 1.8GHz would be carried out.

Simulator Advanced Design System, of Agilent Technologies [15], is used to verify the frequency
responses of proposed designs from the circuit parameters provided by the derived equations.
Moreover, it is impossible to fabricate transmission line with exact dimension due to processing, such
as over-etching, mask misalignment, etc. As the accuracy of line width will affect the value of branch
line impedance and thus the performance of the design, the circuit performance due to slight deviation
of physical dimension would be studied by simulating the schematic with small line width variation.
Furthermore, parasitic effects due to substrate loss and junction discontinuities, which are obvious in
practice, should be taken into account too in the simulation. To a first approximation, these effects
would be included in simulations with appropriate circuit models accordingly. The performance of the
circuit thus can be fine-tuned by computer optimization.

5.1 Design 1
For verification, one of the possible configurations, B (with m= 2 and n-1), operating at 900MH z
and 1.8GHz is chosen for simulation

5.1.1 Schematic simulation

According to the procedures described in chapter 4 and the values of /�/；, , m and n defined, Z；
and Z2 can be calculated by equation ( 4-6 ) and ( 4-7 ). They are about 42 o hm and 61 ohm,
respectively. Figure 5-1 shows the schematic diagram of configuration B, design 1 simulation. Ideal
transmission line model is used and all ports of the circuit are terminated by match load.

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as high as 20dB. For the case of isolation loss (Figure 5-3), it shows the same phenomenon. There are
3dB insertion losses at both frequencies of interest, showing in Figure 5-4. This is in good agreement
with one of initial conditions stated in previous chapter. The bandwidth of each frequency band is
narrower than that of conventional design due to the imbalance in amplitude among frequency that
slightly deviated from the center frequencies. At mid-frequency, it's crucial to note that 6dB insertion
loss is obtained and such attenuations may cause advantage to some applications. Apart from that, the
phase difference between two output signals is equal to 90° at two operating frequency bands. There
are deviations of ±3° over 250MHz around center frequencies, which is sufficient for most applications

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6 Circuit Implementation and Characterization

After schematic simulations, circuits of design 1 and design 2 can be fabricated accordingly. The
implementation details would be explored in this chapter, and measurement results would be
presented as well.

6.1 Design 1
6.1.1 Circuit fabrication
For verification, the configuration B (m=2 and n=1) of design 1 operating at 900MHz and 1.8GHz is
constructed by substrate RT/Duroid 6002. Four SM A connectors are connected for measurement.

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6.1.2 Measurement results

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The measurement results show that the operating frequencies of the circuit shift to 906MH z and
1.82GHz respectively. Showing in Figure 6-2 and Figure 6-3，there's at least 15dB return loss while
there's over 17dB isolation obtained at both operating frequency bands. It offers satisfactory
performance in many applications

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Insertion loss performance shown in Figure 6-4 is well agreed with simulation results. Nearly no
amplitude imbalance is measured between two out power with the loss at the maximum of 3.5dB.
There is mid-band attenuation of 6dB and it is also similar to simulation results. The phase differences
between two output power are 90.2° and 92.4° at lower and upper frequency bands respectively.
Similar to simulation results, it shows phase difference equal to 90° over a wide frequency range. A
summary of measurement is presented in Table 4. The measurement results show a low insertion loss
and phase error, with return loss higher than 15dB and isolation loss higher than 17dB.

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Conclusion:
In this thesis, two designs of dual band branch line coupler are proposed, constructed and characterized.
In the first design, dual band operation is achieved by employing two pairs of transmission line which
the electrical lengths are integral multiple of 90°. Design equations are derived and sub-optimal
solutions can be obtained by relaxing requirements of return loss and isolation loss. Simulation results
show that -3dB output power can be delivered to both output port and coupled port at the operating
frequencies, with the same phase shift between two signals as that of the conventional design. Under
relaxed conditions, there are still at least return loss and isolation loss of20dB. In the second design, a
proposed transformer is used to replace quarter wavelength transmission line so that the topology is
similar to that of conventional design with four open stubs introduced. It provides high return loss and
isolation loss, 90° phase shift and 3dB insertion loss at operating frequencies. Both of the designs can
operate over a wide range of fractional bandwidth with easy realization of transmission line by major
manufacturing technologies. The major differences between two designs are the insertion loss
performance and size of the design. Regarding to insertion loss performance, both simulation and
measurement results show that the second design provides optimum solution with a relatively larger
bandwidth than that of the first design. It can be illustrated when comparing the frequency response of
insertion loss of both designs. Moreover, mid frequency attenuation shows in the second design
provides a good filtering purpose in some applications whereas that of first design shows only 6dB
signal attenuation. Size of the second design is more compact that it shows an unconditional size
reduction in comparison of the conventional design. While in the case of the first design, only
conditional size reduction can be achieved. When comparing with the dual band coupler design using
lumped-distributed structure [16], design 2 is featured compact size, planar structure and lower losses
because of the absences of parasitic effects from lumped elements. In general, both designs are suitable
for dual band applications with moderate bandwidth. Design 2 shows lower losses and smaller size
when design 1 shows a simpler structure.

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