• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.22-28
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• 2008

It proposes the novel design conditions to maximize the power coupling of active directional couplers with mismatched access guides. To verify the validity and accuracy of the conditions proposed, a new coupling efficiency is defined and it depends on the reflection coefficients occurred at the discontinuous input/output interfaces. The numerical results reveal that the phase-matched condition and the minimum-gap condition for those couplers are no longer suitable to optimize the design parameters and a new criterion is needed.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.56-61
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• 2013

Modern integrated circuits (ICs) are becoming an integrated parts of analog, digital, and radio frequency (RF) circuits. Testing these RF circuits on a chip is an important task, not only for fabrication quality control but also for tuning RF circuit elements to fit multi-standard wireless systems. In this paper, RF test circuits suitable for embedded testing are introduced: RF power detectors, power control circuits, directional couplers, and six-port reflectometers. Various types of embedded RF power detectors are reviewed. The conventional approach and our approach for the RF power control circuits are compared. Also, embedded tunable active directional couplers are presented. Then, six-port reflectometers for embedded RF testing are introduced including a 77-GHz six-port reflectometer circuit in a 130 nm process. This circuit demonstrates successful calibrated reflection coefficient simulation results for 37 well distributed samples in a Smith chart. The details including the theory, calibration, circuit design techniques, and simulations of the 77-GHz six-port reflectometer are presented in this paper.