Compact D-Band Differential Single-Inductor Power Divider with 0.0059mm² Silicon Area and 0.35-dB Minimum Insertion Loss

This paper presents a differential compact power divider realized with a single-inductor footprint in the back-end-of-line (BEOL) of IHP SG13S technology for D-band applications. Power dividers based on conventional differential transmission lines (TLs) suffer from parasitic coupling, losses, and excessive silicon area. By synthesizing the TLs with lumped components, the proposed design achieves compact footprint. The analysis confirms the design choice and the selection of the isolation impedance. Three different structures are fabricated and measured to validate the proposed divider. This differential divider achieves a minimum loss of 0.35 dB at 166 GHz and only 90µm × 65µm of silicon area, resulting in, to the best knowledge of the authors, the smallest differential power divider demonstrated at D-band to date.