Design of Low-Profile Millimeter-Wave Substrate Integrated Waveguide Power Divider/Combiner

A low-profile millimeter-wave substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) power divider/combiner is presented in this paper. The simplified model of this compact SIW power dividing/combining structure has been developed. Analysis based on equivalent circuits gives the design formula for perfect power dividing/combining. In order to verify the validity of the design method, a four-way SIW power divider/combiner circuit operating at Ka band is designed, fabricated and measured. Good agreement between simulated and measured results is found for the proposed passive power divider/combiner. Experiments on the four-way passive divider/combiner back-to-back design demonstrate a minimum overall insertion loss of 1.5 dB at 31.1 GHz, corresponding to a power-combining efficiency of 84%. The measured 10-dB return loss bandwidth is demonstrated to be 2.2 GHz, and its 0.5-dB bandwidth was 2 GHz.