IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.

10, OCTOBER 2009

611

A Three-Section Dual-Band Transformer for

Frequency-Dependent Complex Load Impedance
Xin Liu, Student Member, IEEE, Yuanan Liu, Member, IEEE, Shulan Li, Fan Wu, and
Yongle Wu, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractIn this letter, we propose a practical three-section

dual-band transformer, which can terminate frequency-dependent
complex load impedance at two arbitrary bands simultaneously.
Analytical equations are derived to achieve the exact closed-form
solutions. Numerical examples are examined to verify the validity. This three-section transformer can be utilized to match
the complex load impedance with unequal values at two different
frequencies, such as microwave amplifiers based on transistors,
mixers, various kinds of antennas, and so forth.
Index TermsDual-band, impedance transformer, threesection.
Fig. 1. Configuration of three-section transformer.

I. INTRODUCTION

ITH the development of personal wireless communications, people show more and more interest in multiband devices. Achieving dual-band impedance matching is the
first step to realize these kinds of circuits. In 2002, Chow et al.
discovered a two-section transformer that can match at a frequency and its first harmonic [1]. Then Monzon made a comprehensive analysis, derived its closed-form solutions [2], and
extended this construct to match at two arbitrary frequencies
[3]. Similar work has also been done [4] which made it equivalent to a two-section Chebyshev transformer. In [5], complex
conjugated loads were discussed at two frequencies. After that,
the complex impedance matching problem was solved [6] using
two unequal sections.
The transformers mentioned above are not feasible for a
number of matching problems for active devices whose load
impedances vary with frequencies, such as low noise amplifiers
(LNAs), power amplifiers (PAs), mixers and microstrip antennas.
Therefore, an improvement was proposed for the matching
problem of amplifiers [7], which has three sections of transmission lines and two shorted stubs. However, this structure is
complicated and not convenient to fabricate because of grounding
stubs.

Manuscript received May 05, 2009; revised July 09, 2009. First published
September 04, 2009; current version published September 23, 2009. This work
was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development
Program of China (863 Program, 2008AA01Z211), Sino-Swedish IMT-Advanced Cooperation Project ( 2008DFA11780).
The authors are with the School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University
of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China (e-mail: liuxin@bupt.
edu.cn; yuliu@bupt.edu.cn; lishulan@bupt.edu.cn; wufanwww@bupt.cn; wuyongle138@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2009.2029732

In this letter, we propose a three-section transformer for frequency-dependent complex load impedance matching. The design equations are derived and analyzed. Numerical examples
are presented to verify its validity and exactness.
II. ANALYTICAL DERIVATION
The presented three-section transformer composes a traditional two-section transformer (section 1 and section 2 with
and as physical lengths, respectively) and an additional section 3 (with length of ) as illustrated in Fig. 1. The corresponding input impedances and characteristic impedances are
defined as in Fig. 1.
and
(assuming
), the
At the two frequencies
complex load impedance has
and
, respectively, which are not equal to each other in most cases. The suband , respecscripts and denote the two frequencies
tively. To eliminate the frequency-dependent character of the
load impedance, the section 3 is presented to transform the two
. For this
, we have the following two
unequal values to
choices.
. Then the parameters of section
1) Assign
1 and section 2 can be obtained by the approach presented
in [6], in which the transcendental equations can only be
solved by optimization algorithms.
, which means a conjugated
2) Assign
relationship between the two values. The following analysis indicates that the design equations can be solved in
closed-form as long as this conjugated condition can be
satisfied.
Therefore, the whole analysis is organized as the following
two parts. In Section II-A, section 3 transforms the terminated
to conjugated
and
. In Section II-B, secload
tion 1 and section 2 constitute the matching network between
and .

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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

A. Section 3 Transformer

(12)

Firstly we use section 3 to match between

follows:

and

, which
Hereby the section 3 can be designed according to the following
equations:
(1)
(13)
(2)
(14)

in which
and
represent the propagation constant for the
and , are
two bands, respectively. Two variables, namely
desired to be solved from these two equations.
to
, and separating it into real and
Equaling
imagine parts, the equation can be rearranged as

in which can be arbitrary integers but should be chosen carefully to make section 3 easy to fabricate in engineering.

(3)

Once section 3 is settled, the remaining work is to realize a

and . As in Fig. 1, we
two-section transformer between
have the expressions that

B. Two-Section Transformer

(4)
1) If
rewritten as

(15)

: Then (3) and (4) can be

(16)
(5)
(6)

Because
(7)
we know that
,
, simultaneously
and
have the same sign. Then
cannot be zero, resulting in
(8)
(9)
Therefore, if (7)(9) can be satisfied simultaneously, the unknown
and can be solved. It should be demonstrated that
(8) is a strict limitation, because the load impedance may not
agree with (8) coincidently in most cases. This solution only
makes sense for the situations that the load is real, namely
, or frequency-independent that
and
.
If
and
, it can be calculated that
, which means the section 3 is neglectable. In
this case, the presented transformer is exactly the same with the
and
two-section structure in [3]. The other case that
rarely happens in practice.
: (3) and (4) can be further
2) If
simplified utilizing the equation
(10)
Substituting (10) into (3) and (4), and assuming
, it can be deduced that

(11)

Assume a real

(mostly 50 or 75
. Equaling
to
can be established as

in practice), and make

, the design equations

(17)

(18)
Each expression is for two frequencies, which makes them transcendental equations in four variables. Generally this kind of
equations can only be solved by numerical methods or optimiza,
tion algorithms. Thanks to the conjugated relationship of
just as the analysis in [3], the equations can be rewritten as
(19)
(20)
which result in multiple roots for and . Just as the analysis
in [3], to obtain a compact matching structure, we choose
(21)
, accordingly, the equation for
can be
Defining
deduced by eliminating
in (15) and (16), as follows:
(22)
in which b, c, d, e are defined in Appendix A. This standard
fourth-order equation can be easily solved (see Appendix B),
is also determined. The unreasonable roots should be
hence
omitted artificially.

LIU et al.: THREE-SECTION DUAL-BAND TRANSFORMER FOR FREQUENCY-DEPENDENT COMPLEX LOAD IMPEDANCE

613

APPENDIX A
VARIABLE DEFINATION OF EQUATION (20)
(23)
(24)
(25)
(26)

Fig. 2. Simulated results of dB S11 versus frequency.

APPENDIX B
SOLUTION OF
III. NUMERICAL EXAMPLES
In this section, a numerical example is given to verify the approach. A casually chosen example, transistor AT41511 is examined at the ISM bands of 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz. The input imat 2.4 GHz and
pedances are
at 5.8 GHz [8], which need to be complex conjugated matched to 50 . The design procedure is:
using (13), then (14) gives the value of .
1) Calculate
and
From this step it can be found that
;
2) Given
and , it is easy to obtain that
is
at 2.4 GHz and
at 5.8 GHz, which agree with the request of conjugated
relationship;
. Then
3) From (21) we know that
is obtained from (22) and
.
This example is numerically simulated and the diagram of
S11 versus frequency is depicted in Fig. 2. It can be seen that
the three-section transformer matches well at the two required
frequencies, which proves the validity of the presented solution.
Moreover, the bandwidth is more than 300 MHz at each band
(12.5% for 2.4 GHz and 5.8% for 5.8 GHz), which is feasible
for most situations.
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel transformer has been proposed to match the
frequency-dependent complex impedance at two bands simultaneously. In this letter, we derived the design equations for
three-section transformer, and obtained the closed-form solutions. An example was used to testify the exactness and prove
the validity. The presented transformer solves the dual-band
match problem for frequency-dependent load and is practical
in designing the matching network for amplifiers, antennas and
other devices.

(27)
in which
(28)
(29)
(30)
(31)
(32)

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