Design of an extremely miniaturized branch-line coupler

In this paper, a new size-reduction approach for branch-line coupler is introduced which uses parallel end-shorted coupled lines with lumped capacitors. The characteristic of the new design was analyzed using even-odd mode method, and simulated on HFSS before fabricated on the FR4 epoxy glass cloth copper-clad plat (CCL) PCB substrate at center frequency of 1 GHz. The electrical length of transmission line was reduced to 15 degrees, therefore the size of branch-line coupler was largely reduced approximately maintaining the same characteristic around the stable center frequency. The insertion loss of the branch-line coupler filter was -4.39 dB. The size of the overall hybrid is $20mm{\times}20mm$. Measurements results were well agreed with the simulated ones.