Advantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner | disadvantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner
This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Wilkinson power divider/splitter or combiner. It mentions Wilkinson power divider or combiner advantages or benefits and Wilkinson power divider or combiner disadvantages or drawbacks.
What is Wilkinson power divider or combiner?
Introduction:
There are many ways to design power divider/splitter or combiner.
As we know power combiner combines the power available at its
input ports. Similarly power divider splits power available at its input port equally to
all the output ports.
Refer Power Divider vs Power Combiner.
There are various ways to design such power combiners and splitters. One of the way is as per layout and schematic shown in the figure-1 which is known as Wilkinson design. The example design is for 2 Way wilkinson power splitter. Refer article on Wilkinson power divider design>>.
It can be matched at all ports and lossless when output ports are matched.
There are three designs based on which power dividers or combiners are developed.
• Resistive design
• Reactive design
• Wilkinson design
Benefits or advantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner
Following are the benefits or advantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner:
➨It is most robust design.
➨It has matched output ports and hence will not have reflections.
➨It provides better isolation between output ports than T-junction type splitter.
➨It offers low insertion loss.
➨Wilkinson power divider is wide band circuit (2:1 or more).
➨It can also be designed to give arbitrary power division.
➨Isolation is achieved between ports by terminating resistors.
Any unequal mismatch or out-of-phase condition which couple power from one line to
the other is attenuated by resistor.
Drawbacks or disadvantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner
Following are the disadvantages of Wilkinson power divider or combiner:
➨ The power handling capability is limited as terminations must be
mounted inside the coupler or divider or combiner.
➨Insertion loss of wilkinson design is not as good as reactive design.
➨The divider or combiner is often made in microstrip or stripline forms.
Refer disadvantages of microstrip line and stripline.
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