A compact three-way Wilkinson divider with reduced central line length

In this paper a compact three-way Wilkinson divider is attained by artificially shortening the central quarter wavelength line by resorting to reactive loading. As opposed to a conventional designs, with a meandered central line, the proposed design is much shorter, hence allowing a tighter integration.Design is carried out at 2.45 GHz, on a commercial FR408 substrate, characterization of the prototype shows a very good behavior with return loss and isolation better than 10 dB over a 60% band, with a device which is almost 30% shorter than a standard three-way divider.