A planar wideband balun is proposed. The proposed balun consists of a novel slotline T-junction and three microstrip-slotline transitions. Similar to the principle of the E-plane waveguide T-junction, the slotline T-junction acts as a phase inverter. With the microstrip-slotline transition, the device employs microstrip as feedlines. The radiation loss of the slotline is reduced to improve the insertion loss by loading the slotline with a superstrate and adding via holes along the slotline. An experimental balun with a bandwidth of 128% from 2.2 GHz to 10 GHz is designed, fabricated, and measured for validation. The measured results have reasonable agreement with the simulated ones.
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