Highly-integrable K-band power dividers based on digital CMOS technology

In this paper, we present two-way and four-way power dividers that operate in wideband over K-band. To maximize the integrability with other circuit blocks, the power dividers are designed in a purely digital CMOS technology without any RF back-end-of-line process. We discuss a design issue arising from the high loss of transmission lines in the digital process. A capacitor-loaded Wilkinson topology is adopted for a compact size. The proposed dividers are implemented in a 0.13-μm digital CMOS process with automatic dummy metal fills. We also analyze the effect of the dummy fills on the power divider performance, showing good agreement with measured results.