A Miniaturized Marchand Balun Model With Short-End and Capacitive Feeding

Abstract

A new equivalent circuit model of an electrical size-reduced coupled line radio frequency Marchand balun is proposed and investigated in this paper. It consists of two parts of coupled lines with significantly reduced electrical length. Compared with the conventional Marchand balun, a short-circuit ending is applied instead of the open-circuit ending, and a capacitive feeding is introduced. The electrical length of the proposed balun is reduced to around 1/3 compared with that of the conventional Marchand balun. Detailed mathematical analysis for this design is included in this paper. Groups of circuit simulation results are shown to verify the conclusions. A sample balun is fabricated in microstrip line type on the Teflon substrate, with low dielectric constant of 2.54. It has a dimension of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.189\lambda _{g} \times 0.066 \lambda _{g}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with amplitude imbalance of 0.1 dB and phase imbalance of 179.09° ± 0.14°. The simulation and experiment results are in good agreement.