Title: Miniaturised broadband branch line coupler for WiMAX and LTE applications

Authors: Krishnan Thiyagarajan; Thangavelu Kesavamurthy; Karuppaiah Alagar Banupriya; Raja Sindhuja

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India

Abstract: This paper presents the bandwidth enhancement and miniaturisation of the branch line coupler for LTE/WiMAX applications (2.45-2.7 GHz). The broadband nature of conventional branch line coupler is attained by using three-section branch line coupler. The circuit area of the broadband coupler is reduced with the aid of von Koch fractal method of miniaturisation. An FR4 (Flame Retardant type 4 Epoxy) substrate having a thickness of 1.6 mm is selected to construct the microstrip circuit of broadband and miniaturised broadband branch line couplers. S-parameter simulation is carried out to compare the performance of proposed miniaturised broadband coupler with broadband and conventional branch line couplers. The simulation result shows that the proposed coupler achieves a bandwidth of 610 MHz with an area reduction of around 34%. The printed circuit board fabrication of the conventional, broadband and miniaturised broadband coupler was done to evaluate the measurement results using vector network analyser.

Keywords: branch line couplers; directional couplers; Koch fractal; microstrip; broadband; miniaturisation; bandwidth enhancement; WiMAX; LTE; miniaturised broadband coupler; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2015.066748

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2015 Vol.8 No.1, pp.66 - 73

Received: 21 Aug 2013
Accepted: 02 Jun 2014

Published online: 04 Jan 2015 *

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