Passive combining network for THz phased arrays

Abstract

Power combiners play an important role in the phased array transceivers at mmWave and THz frequencies. Wilkinson combiner has been in use for a long time and is considered one of the best power combiners due to its good port isolation and low losses. In this work theoretical and simulation studies have been done to design the power combiner for sub-THz receiver front-end in the IHP 130nm SiGe process. The Wilkinson combiner designed in this work is able to provide decent performance around 300GHz frequency and shows good isolation between the input ports. The differential Wilkinson combiner has input combining port isolation of -18.2dB and reflection coefficients are around -8.5±0.5dB. While from the transmission coefficients the path loss observed is around 3.7dB. Besides this the differential Wilkinson combiner has also provided decent performance with the phase shifter testbench.