Introductory lecture: Microstrip Divider-Combiner Based Pulse Expander

The presentation is devoted to a passive microwave device, which employs multiple branches with different delays to achieve pulse expansion in time from 200 ps till 450 ps. Device consists of single printed circuit board (PCB) with microstrip pulse splitter, three microstrip delay lines with different lengths and microstrip pulse combiner. The main challenge of the design lies in the necessity to match components of the pulse expander in an extremely broad frequency range from DC till approximately 4 GHz. Research consisted of several stages which included theoretical calculations, modeling in HFSS of separate parts and whole expander and, finally, experimental validation of components and whole microwave device.