A Millimeter-Wave Reconfigurable On-Chip Coupler With Tunable Power-Dividing Ratios in 0.13-μm BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents a millimeter-wave (mm-wave) on-chip coupler with tunable power dividing ratios and constant phase response. Composed by two coupled lines, two capacitors and two series-connected varactors, the proposed tunable coupler offers broadband frequency responses for 5G applications. Theoretical analysis for wideband operation is provided. For demonstration, a millimeter-wave tunable coupler is implemented in a standard 0.13- SiGe (Bi) CMOS technology and measured through an on-wafer probing system. From 24 to 38 GHz, the proposed tunable coupler shows a power-dividing ratio ranged from 0 to 6.5 dB, while maintaining an in-band return loss of better than 10 dB and output isolation of 20 dB, simultaneously. The phase imbalance is better than +/- 2.5 degrees with a measured insertion loss of 1.3 dB across the entire tuning range. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first time that an on-chip coupler with tunable power-dividing ratios is reported operating at mm-wave bands for, particularly, 5G applications.