IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO.

8, AUGUST 2005 521

A Novel Rat Race Coupler Design

for Dual-Band Applications
Kwok-Keung M. Cheng, Senior Member, IEEE, and Fai-Leung Wong, Student Member, IEEE

Abstract—This letter presents a novel and compact rat-race

coupler design that can operate at two widely separated frequency
bands. It is accomplished by modifying the length and impedance
of the branch lines in the conventional structure, and the in-
sertion of two additional shunt stubs. The proposed circuit also
features planar structure and low insertion loss. For verification,
the measured performance of a microstrip coupler operating at
900/2000 MHz are shown.
Index Terms—Couplers, dual band, microwave circuits.

I. INTRODUCTION

R AT-RACE coupler is one of the passive circuits that are

widely used in microwave and millimeter-wave applica-
tions. This device offers both in-phase and anti-phase relation-
ship at the designated outputs with equal power splitting, as well
as perfect isolation between the two input ports. Rat-race cou- Fig. 1. Proposed dual-band coupler structure.
pler is widely employed in the design of balanced mixers for
obtaining good spurious signal rejection. However, due to the
inherent narrow-band nature of the traditional design, its appli- For the derivation of the branch-line impedance values, the
cation to wide-band and multiband systems is thus limited. In even- and odd-mode analysis (Fig. 2) is applied in conjunc-
the past years, research was mainly focused on bandwidth ex- tion with the input-output relationship (magnitude and phase)
pansion [1]–[3] and size reduction [4], [5] techniques. of race-race coupler
In this work, a novel, planar, rat-race coupler design suitable
for dual-band operation is presented with explicit design for- (1)
mulas. The proposed circuit also features compact layout and (2)
low insertion loss performance. For demonstration, the experi-
(3)
mental results of a 900/2000-MHz rat race coupler implemented
(4)
using microstrip is included.
(5)
II. PROPOSED DUAL-BAND COUPLER DESIGN Subsequently, a general design requirement for the proposed
Fig. 1 shows the basic configuration of the proposed dual- configuration may there be formulated as
band coupler, where and are the centre frequencies of the
lower and upper bands. In compared to the conventional design, (6)
the major differences are the electrical length of the longer arm
(equals to 450 evaluated at the average value of and ); the (7)
branch-line impedance values (not 70.7 ); and the inclusion of
two additional shunt stubs with short-circuit termination. (8)

(9)

Note that , , and are the electrical lengths of

Manuscript received February 8, 2005; revised March 30, 2005. The review
of this letter was arranged by Associate Editor J.-G. Ma.
the corresponding branch-lines evaluated at the two operating
The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, frequencies ( & ), where
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong (e-mail:
kkcheng@ee.cuhk.edu.hk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2005.852792
(11)

1531-1309/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

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522 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO. 8, AUGUST 2005

Fig. 4. Measured return loss and port isolation.

Fig. 2. Even- and odd-mode topologies.

Fig. 5. Measured insertion loss (in-phase outputs).

Fig. 3. Variation of line impedance versus frequency ratio.

From the above equations, one can deduce that a possible solu-
tion for dual-band operation is simply given by

(12)
Fig. 6. Measured phase response (in-phase outputs).
(13)

(14)

(15)

(16)

(17)

(18)

Fig. 3 shows the computed impedance variation as a func-

Fig. 7. Measured insertion loss (anti-phase outputs).
tion of the frequency ratio . However, due to the prac-
tical limit of impedance realization (30–100 typically), these
validated using a circuit simulator. The optimum values of ,
curves suggested that the operating frequency of the proposed
, and were found to be approximately 44 , 52 ,
coupler is in the range of (the theoret-
52 and 40 , respectively.
ical limit is ).
For experimental demonstration, a prototype (Fig. 9) was
constructed using Duriod substrate with dielectric constant of
III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS 3.38 and thickness of 0.8 mm. Scattering parameter measure-
For verification, a dual-band micro-strip rat-race coupler op- ments were performed using HP8510C network analyzer over
erating at 900 and 2000 MHz was designed by (15)–(18) and the frequency range from 0.1 to 4 GHz. Fig. 4–8 shows the
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CHENG AND WONG: NOVEL RAT RACE COUPLER DESIGN 523

TABLE I
MEASURED PERFORMANCE OF RAT-RACE COUPLER

Fig. 8. Measured phase response (anti-phase outputs).

(including connector losses) was found to be at most 0.7 dB
higher than the loss-less case. The operating bandwidth of the
coupler is governed by the amplitude and phase mismatch re-
quirement to around 50 MHz.

IV. CONCLUSION
A new, compact, planar, rat race coupler design for dual-band
operation has been presented and experimentally verified.
A prototype implemented using microstrip has been con-
structed and characterized with excellent measurement results.
Dual-band coupler design with much wider bandwidth and
band separation is under development.

Fig. 9. Fabricated dual-band rat race coupler.
measured performance of the coupler in which the center fre-
quencies of the two operating bands were found to be slightly
shifted to 880 MHz and 1980 MHz.
Table I gives the overall performance of the coupler measured
at the two center frequencies. Return loss and port isolation of
better than 28 dB were observed. Moreover, the insertion loss
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