A compact planar power combiner with complex impedance matching

This article presents a compact power combiner/divider for solid-state amplifier applications inspired by spatial combiner. The proposed “one-stage” combining structure is realized by a single port tapered to an oversized microstrip connecting to parallel multiport microstrip sections. By adjusting the geometries of the structure, uniform amplitude/phase, and complex impedance matching at the multiport outputs can be achieved. A prototype 1-to-4 divider/combiner is designed and characterized at 5 GHz. Measured and simulated results showed similar trend and decent agreement. The measured combining efficiency of the circuit is 82.44% at 5 GHz. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1121–1125, 2016