A millimeter-wave termination which is tolerant to the resistance error of the embedded resistive film in a multi-layered LTCC substrate has been developed. The tolerance to the resistance error can be accomplished using two bifurcated strip lines overlapping with the resistive film, whose lengths are different form each other. It has been experimentally demonstrated that the proposed termination configuration is effective to enhance the tolerance to resistance error of the embedded resistive film in the LTCC substrate.

This paper describes a three-port power divider with compensation networks for non-ideal isolation resistor. The compensation networks consist of two pairs of transmission lines and cancel out the parasitic reactance of the non-ideal isolation resistor. The design equations to provide perfect return loss and isolation at a center frequency are presented. The availability of the proposed power divider has been verified by the comparison between calculated and experimental results in the Ku-band.

A novel waveguide power divider based on a coaxial-to-waveguide transition using a H-plane probe is presented. The waveguide consists of split metal blocks and substrates which are alternately stacked. The power divider is realized by arranging identical transitions using coaxial probes short-circuited with metal patterns on the substrate. The parasitic reactance of probes can be canceled out with the metal patterns on the substrate, so it is ease to design the power divider. The advantages of this structure are small footprint, low insertion loss, simple fabrication, and ease of design. A design method of the proposed power divider is described. The fabricated eight-way power divider shows excellent performances at 10 GHz-band.

Optically controlled beam forming techniques are effective for phased-array antenna control. We have developed the Fourier transform optical beamformer (FT-OBF). The antenna radiation pattern inputted into an amplitude spatial light modulator (A-SLM) is optically Fourier transformed to a specific phase-front light beam equivalent to an antenna excitation in the FT-OBF. Optical signal processing, used the Fourier transform optics, is effective to large-scale, two-dimensional, and high-speed signal processing. To implement a flexible and finer antenna beam pattern control, we use an A-SLM as input image formation of the FT optics. And, to realize a small-size FT-OBF, we use symmetric triplet lenses with convex, concave and convex lens. The total optical system becomes below 1/5 length compared with the length using single lens. Finally, we evaluated the developed FT-OBF with the generated amplitude and phase distributions, which excitation signal of an array antenna. We measured an antenna radiation beam pattern, beam steering and beam width control, in the C-band. Measurement results agreed with theoretical calculated results. These results show the feasibility of the spatial light modulator based FT-OBF.

A low-loss serial power combiner using suspended stripline is described. It consists of novel broadside-coupled directional couplers which have shunt capacitances at the edges of the coupled sections. These additional shunt capacitances compensate for poor directivities of the couplers because of inhomogeneous dielectric in suspended stripline structure. The fabricated three-way power combiner has achieved good performance with insertion loss less than 0.23 dB over a bandwidth of 10% in 2 GHz band.

A novel asymmetric tapered-line power divider is presented. It has several strip resistors which are formed like a ladder between the tapered-line conductors to achieve a good output isolation. The equivalent circuits are derived with the even/odd-mode analysis. These equivalent circuits are employed to design the asymmetric power divider. The fabricated asymmetric power divider with 1:2 power dividing ratio shows broadband performances in return loss and isolation which are greater than 19 dB over a 3:1 bandwidth in the C-Ku bands.

A strip line broadside hybrid coupler which is tolerant to manufacturing errors in a multi-layered LTCC substrate has been developed. The tolerance to a displacement error and a thickness variation in the multi-layered LTCC substrate can be achieved by using the tandem arrangement of diagonally shifted coupled lines with adjacent ground walls. It has been demonstrated that the coupling deviation from designed characteristics in our proposed hybrid coupler is very small.

In a multi-layered RF circuit, it is important to avoid unexpected coupling caused by a parallel plate mode excited between different ground layers. Ground via-holes that short-circuit different ground layers are used for suppressing this mode. Quantitative evaluation of relations between suppression effect and ground via-hole disposition is required for optimal design. In this paper, a simple design formula that describes the suppression ratio is derived by mode-matching technique. The results of comparison with an FEM simulation validate our proposed formula. It is shown that the technique is indispensable for designing optimal disposition of via-holes to minimize the area of the ground via-holes for desired performance.