Knowles Capacitors has developed a Wilkinson power divider from their Dielectric Laboratories (DLI) facility. The PDW05758 is a power dividers designed to provide in phase power splitting/combining over a broad bandwidth in low power applications.
The power divider uses thin film fabrication with integrated resistors, coupled with DLI’s high permittivity ceramic materials, to provide a high performance and a repeatable design solution. The thin film process provides a greater degree of consistency and repeatability over that achievable from printed wiring board construction. Moreover as the resistors are integrated internally and located also with ‘thin film precision’ the amplitude and phase balance are far superior to what can be achieved with traditional surface mount resistors soldered onto a printed wiring board. The PDW05758 power divider also utilizes a proprietary ceramic substrate that DLI uses for filters. This high permittivity, yet temperature stable, substrate allows for the design of the power divider without typical parasitic effects associated with MMIC base solutions.
The PDW05758 operates from 6 GHz to 18 GHz with a return loss and isolation over 20 dB and an insertion loss of 0.4 dB. The divider is significantly smaller than what could be internally designed in typical printed wiring boards. It measures 0.160” (4.06mm) x 0.185” (4.7mm) and can replace both packaged MMIC based solutions as well as larger dividers integrated into printed wiring boards (PWB) without sacrificing performance.
