An Ultraminiaturized Bandpass Filtering Marchand Balun Chip With Spiral Coupled Lines Based on GaAs Integrated Passive Device Technology

Abstract

The integrated passive device (IPD) technology has become a new research hotspot, and it depends on electrical characteristics of GaAs, NiCr, and Si <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">4</sub> to construct radio frequency (RF) components. RF elements constructed by the IPD technology have features of high quality and ultra-small size, especially for capacitors and inductors. In order to realize the miniaturization of RF circuits, dimensions become as small as possible. Consequently, the layout of a spiral coupled line (SCL) cannot be drawn freely, so that it has uncontrollable odd- and even-mode impedances and a large coupling coefficient, which may limit the design of the traditional Marchand balun negatively. This article solves this problem by designing a GaAs IPD Marchand balun with 1/8-wavelength coupled lines (CLs) and using a capacitor termination to replace the open end in the conventional Marchand balun. Meanwhile, a filter is added to realize a filtering function. The proposed bandpass filtering Marchand balun (BFMB) chip has a size of 1.49 mm × 1.39 mm, and measured results indicate that it has an operation band of 2.39-5.68 GHz with a phase imbalance of 5.26° and a magnitude imbalance of less than 0.35 dB.