Recent Trends and Challenges in Microwave Power Dividers

This paper presents a review on recent trends and challenges in the development of power dividing components. Over these years, power dividers have been changing their structures and technology in order to be compatible with the newer changes adopted in designing of communication systems. From being operated as a single-frequency component to being flexible with dual-frequency bands, Wilkinson power dividers have come a long way to become an important and integral part of various RF/microwave devices. The recent technologies for cellular communication have motivated researchers to work on miniaturization and harmonic suppression of power dividers to make them more compact and efficient. Both equal and unequal power dividers are largely employed for L and S-Band applications (GSM, CDMA, Personnel communication systems). Sparameters such a return loss, insertion loss and isolation between output ports plays an important role in their designing.