A General and Effective Design Method of Multi-Way Filtering Power Dividers on a New Multi-Port Topology for Industrial Application

In this article, a new general and effective design method for multi-way filtering power dividers (FPDs) including both even- and odd-number-way FPDs is proposed, which is promising in both industrial and academic field. With a developed multi-port topology, a new class of multiway FPDs are creatively built by elaborately exploring only one modified multimode resonator and arranging isolation resistors in an easily realizable form. They exhibit attractive features with satisfactory operation performance, low cost, easy implementation, and integration, miniaturization as well as flexible design freedom, compared to other existing designs without introducing additional complex circuit. Even more number-way or other-order multiway FPDs can also be conveniently realized by generalizing these structures without dramatically increasing circuit complexity and size. Two demonstrator FPDs, namely a three-way FPD and a four-way FPD, as examples are implemented following the given design procedure. With the even- and odd-mode analysis, the resonant modes are flexibly controlled to achieve desired bandwidth and isolation resistors are properly selected to achieve high isolations. Measured results coincide well with simulated ones. As expected, high isolations, nice port matching, compact size as well as extensible topology, etc., are attained in these prototypes, verifying the feasibility of the proposed method.