Compact single‐level and multilevel folded‐line RF power dividers

6. CONCLUSION The integrated macromodeling method proposed in this paper is an accurate approach to address the high-speed interconnect problem, which is based on a rational function approximation of the Y-parameter transfer function from the full-wave FDTD sim- ulation and equivalent circuit approach in the context of a SPICE simulator. The VFM employed for rational function approximation in this paper provides a considerably accurate way to construct the macromodel of the interconnect subnetwork. Conversion of the interconnect macromodel to an equivalent circuit can facilitate the signal integrity analysis, involving both distributed interconnect and linear/nonlinear circuit components, by using SPICE circuit simulation. Signal integrity analysis of large hybrid interconnect and circuit problems using this approach will be further studied in the future. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to express their thanks to Dr. Yuan Weiliang of the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) for his useful discussion and suggestions. This work is jointly supported by the IHPC and National University of Singapore. ABSTRACT: A new design methodology for compact single-level and multilevel folded-line radio frequency (RF) power dividers is presented. Simple design equations are developed for compact 3-dB Wilkinson power dividers with single and cascaded folded-line C-sections. The new topologies show a reduction in footprint area to less than 40% of the conventional topology for single-level compact designs and to less than 17% of the conventional topology for a multilevel compact design. The new compact designs are validated by full-wave electromagnetic simula- tion as well as measurements. Excellent agreement is reported. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 39: 187-189, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.11164