Millimeter-wave miniaturized hybrid couplers integrated on advanced bicmos technology.

In this article, we present the design and the measurement of two hybrid couplers for millimeter-wave applications realized in the BiCMOS9MW 130nm process (ST Microelectronics). The aim is to demonstrate several miniaturization possibilities of a conventional branchline coupler while maintaining a constant 90° phase shift and a low insertion loss over the full 57-66-GHz band. The first miniaturized coupler is composed of meandered transmission lines; the second is a quasi-lumped quadrature coupler with discrete capacitors. The performance of these circuits is compared with the most recent on-chip 60-GHz couplers. We especially demonstrate the possibility to achieve state-of-the-art performance while using miniaturization techniques. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:2221-2223, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27079 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]