Wilkinson power divider

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Microwave Engineering concerns the application of physics to design systems that contain and process microwave energy for useful means. One such means is communication links, cell phones, microwave ovens, etc.

One device used in microwave circuits are power splitters, devices that allow a microwave signal to be split equally between two or more branches (up to n number of branches). It allows signals to be distributed and processed as needed.

The Wilkinson power divider, named after Ernest J. Wilkinson, is a lossy N-port network commonly used for power splitting and combining. The Wilkinson power divider is especially useful because the output ports are simultaneously isolated and matched. The S matrix for the common case of a 2-way equal-split Wilkinson power divider at the design frequency is given by

$[S]=\frac{-j}{\sqrt{2}}\begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 1 & 0 & 0 \\ \end{bmatrix}$

Inspection of the S matrix reveals that the network is reciprocal ( $S i j = S j i$ ), that the terminals are matched ( $S 11, S 22, S 33 = 0$ ), that the output terminals are isolated ( $S 23, S 32$ =0), and that equal power division is achieved ( $S 21 = S 31$ ). The non-unitary matrix results from the fact that the network is lossy.