Low NF and High P1dB Wideband Quasi-Circulator With Unequal Power Split and Reconfigurable Inter-Stage Matching.

In this article, a wideband quasi-circulator (QC) with the low noise figure (NF) and high 1-dB compression point (P1dB) is proposed. The slotline-based 180° hybrid is introduced to achieve the wideband high transmitter-receiver (TX-RX) isolation. Meanwhile, the bidirectional in-phase stage and the nonreciprocal out-of-phase stage are utilized to obtain specific power-split ratios for the low insertion loss and high antenna-transmitter (ANT-TX) isolation. By using the unequal power split, the proposed QC is without the fundamental 3-dB loss seen in reciprocal ANT interfaces. Besides, to further enhance the TX-RX isolation within a wideband, a reconfigurable inter-stage matching network based on a varactor-tuned capacitor is implemented. To verify the mechanisms mentioned above, a reconfigurable wideband QC operating at 1.75–2.9 GHz is implemented and fabricated. The total power consumption is 224 mW. The measurement exhibits in-band TX-RX isolation of 27–58 dB. The TX-ANT and ANT-RX insertion losses are 4.3–5.0 dB and 1.0–1.9 dB, respectively. The QC also achieves the minimum in-band ANT-RX NF of 3.4 dB. Meanwhile, the measured TX-ANT and ANT-RX IIP3s are 39.4 and 32.5 dBm, respectively. The TX input P1dB is greater than 28.78 dBm, while the RX input P1dB is 23 dBm. The TX-induced ANT-RX P1dB is measured to be 28 dBm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]