328-333Ĭlick here to go to our main page on couplers and splitters Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 4th Edition, John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1998, pp. Wilkinson, 'An N-way Power Divider', IRE Trans. The resistor adds no resistive loss to the power split from port 1, so an ideal Wilkinson splitter is 100% efficient.Ī veteran of WWII, Mr. The resistor does a lot more than allow all three ports to be matched, it fully isolates port 2 from port 3 at the center frequency: if you put power into port 2 or port 3, all of it goes up in heat in the ideal case. Wilkinson relied on quarter-wave transformers to match the split ports to the common port.īecause a loss-less reciprocal three-port network cannot have all ports simultaneously matched, Wilkinson knew he had to cheat so he added one resistor and the rest is history. It splits an input signal into two equal phase output signals, or combines two equal-phase signal into one in the opposite direction. The Wilkinson power splitter was invented around 1960 by an engineer named Ernest Wilkinson.
