Analysis and design of wideband active power splitter with interleaf transmission line topology

This article proposes a new wideband active power splitter design where the gain cells along the input transmission line are arranged in interleaf rather than the conventional parallel style, thus the circuit's high-frequency performance can be greatly improved. Both theoretical analysis and circuit simulation have been carried out; as a demonstration, parallel and interleaf active power splitters are designed using 0.1 μm GaAs pseudo-morphic heterostructure field effect transistors (GaAs pHEMT) process and measured on-wafer. The results clearly indicate the superiority of the interleaf topology. A 40 GHz interleaf active power splitter in 90 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) is then presented where the magnitude and phase imbalance between the two output ports are 0.15 dB and 2.6° at 20 GHz, and 0.16 dB and 14° at 40 GHz. The output-port isolation is better than 30 dB across the whole frequency range.