Attenuators are passive resistive elements that do the opposite of amplifiers, they kill gain.

Why would you want to do that? Suppose your design specification calls for 10 dB gain, with a 1.2:1 maximum VSWR. You search the amplifier vendors, and locate an amplifier in your frequency band, but it has 14.5 dB gain and a lousy 2.5:1 match on the input. By adding an attenuator to the input, you can bring the gain down to 10 dB, and you will be improving the input match. Two things to consider when you play this game: don t add an attenuator to an amplifier s input if you are concerned with the amplifier s noise figure, every dB of attenuation you put on the input will raise the noise figure by the same amount. Similarly, don t add an attenuator to a power amplifier s output without considering what it will do to your output power, or what the RF output power of the power amp might do to your attenuator. There are five common attenuator topologies used in microwave circuits, the tee, the pi, the bridged tee, the reflection attenuator and the balanced attenuator. The tee, pi and bridged tee each require two different resistor values, while the reflection and balanced attenuators need only a matched pair of resistors. This allows both the reflection and balanced topologies to be used as variable attenuators with a single control voltage or control current. There are two variations of the reflection attenuator, depending on whether the terminations R1 are less than or greater than the system characteristic impedance Z0. When would you use a tee versus a pi versus a bridged tee? Here's some examples. When you are designing a fixed-value 3-dB attenuator on a thin film circuit, with a sheet resistivity fixed at 100 ohms per square, the 8.5 ohm value of R1 for a tee might be a little hard to accurately etch, and the pi might be a better choice. On the other hand, if your sheet resistivity was 10 ohms per square, you'd need 29 squares to create R1 for the pi, and that might prove to be too inductive to work at high frequency. With thick film circuits, you can take your pick because there are different resistivity values available. The bridged tee can be thought of as a modified pi network. The attraction to the bridged tee comes when you are making a variable attenuator, with PIN diodes or FETs. Here are two reasons you might consider it over the pi. First, it only needs two variable resistors (pi and tee need three). Second, the bridged tee uses the full range of resistor values, from zero to infinity, for both R1 and R2. For the pi attenuator, R1 never goes below Z0 (50 ohms) so some of the diodes' useful resistance range is wasted. Finally, the bridged tee has a tendency to match itself to Z0 at high attenuation values, because of its two fixed resistors. In practice, the pi may give you higher attenuation range. The resistor R2 can be a "sneak path" in the bridged tee because the diode (or FET) never reaches zero ohms.

The table below provides equations for solving for the attenuator resistive elements: Attenuator equations
Configuration Tee Attenuator R2 vs. R1 R1 vs. Attenuation R2 vs. Attenuation

Pi Attenuator

Bridged Tee Attenuator

Reflection Attenuator, R1 <Z0 Reflection Attenuator, R1>Z0 Balanced Attenuator

Click on the calculator icon ( ) to check out our calculator where you'll be able to enter your desired attenuation parameters and we will calculate the resistors for you. If you use the above equations to calculate R1 and R2, be sure to observe whether "ATT" is divided by 10 or 20. For those of you too busy or lazy to calculate your own resistor values, the table below should be useful (Z0 is assumed to be 50 ohms, but you can scale the values if necessary).

Isolator :
An isolator is a two-port device that transmits microwave or radio frequency power in one direction only. It is used to shield equipment on its input side, from the effects of conditions on its output side; for example, to prevent a microwave source being detuned by a mismatched load.

Non-reciprocity
An isolator in a non-reciprocal device, with a non-symmetric scattering matrix. An ideal isolator transmits all the power entering port 1 to port 2, while absorbing all the power entering port 2, so that to within a phase-factor its S-matrix is

To achieve non-reciprocity, an isolator must necessarily incorporate a non-reciprocal material. At microwave frequencies this material is invariably a ferrite which is biased by a static magnetic field. The ferrite is positioned within the isolator such that the microwave signal presents it with a rotating magnetic field, with the rotation axis aligned with the direction of the static bias field. The behaviour of the ferrite depends on the sense of rotation with respect to the bias field, and hence is different for microwave signals travelling in opposite directions. Depending on the exact operating conditions, the signal travelling in one direction may either be phase-shifted, displaced from the ferrite or absorbed.

Def. 2:
Microwave Isolator is a passive, non-reciprocal device with three or more ports used to transmit microwave energy in a specific direction. This Microwave Isolator is used to prevent reflected microwave energy from the magnetron preventing excessive magnetron heating or molding. Microwave Isolator is a circulator with an absorbing load, attaching to the port used to transmit the reflected energy that is generated from the magnetron and is transmitted to the load port and absorbed. This Telecommunication Equipment is widely used in telecommunication, test equipment, electronic warfare, radar and avionic systems. This broadcasting equipment is available in various frequency ranges and multi-junction topographies requiring diverse applications. They are configured with diverse features for various applications like drop-in or coaxial connectorized packaging, for pc board or cable installation in pcs/pcn and cellular based stations, and for point to point microwave radio telecommunication

Circulator :
A circulator is a ferrite device (ferrite is a class of materials with strange magnetic properties) with usually three ports. The beautiful thing about circulators is that they are non-reciprocal. That is, energy into port 1 predominantly exits port 2, energy into port 2 exits port 3, and energy into port 3 exits port 1. In a reciprocal device the same fraction of energy that flows from port 1 to port 2 would occur to energy flowing the opposite direction, from port 2 to port 1.

CCW and CW circulators The selection of ports is arbitrary, and circulators can be made to "circulate" either clockwise (CW) or counterclockwise (CCW). The above symbols are available in a free download called Electronic_Symbols.doc, you can find it in our download area. In addition to the ferrite substrate, a magnet is required to make a circulator. Circulators come in waveguide, coax, and "drop-in" microstrip varieties. Microstrip circulators are often used in T/R modules to duplex the antenna to the power amp and LNA. Waveguide always provides the best loss and power handling. Here's a WR-42 (Ku-band) waveguide circulator we found on Ebay:

WR42 waveguide circulator A circulator is sometimes called a "duplexer", meaning that is duplexes two signals into one channel (e.g. transmit and receive into an antenna). This is not to be confused with the term "diplexer" which is refers to a filter arrangement where two frequency bands are separated into two channels from a single three-terminal device. A lot of people mix up these terms. You can remember the correct definitions because "filter" and "diplexer" both have an "i" in them, and "circulator" and "duplexer" both have a "u". What are circulators good for? The make a great antenna interface for a transmit/receive system. Energy can be made to flow from the transmitter (port 1) to the antenna (port 2) during transmit, and from the antenna (port 2) to the receiver (port 3) during receive. Circulators have low electrical losses and can be made to handle huge powers, well into kilowatts. They usually operate over no more than an octave bandwidth, and are purely an RF component (they don't work at DC).
Circulator rule of thumb!

A circulator's isolation is roughly equal to its return loss, and should always be specified to the same requirement. A circulator with 20 dB isolation will need to have a return loss of 20 dB. Think about it, if you terminate the third arm in a perfect 50 ohms,

the clockwise isolation you will measure in a CCW circulator won't be better than the stray signal that is bouncing off the loaded port due to the reflected signal due to its mismatch to 50 ohms. Circulators and isolators can be made from 100's of MHz to through W-band (110 GHz). They can be packaged as planar microstrip components, coaxial components or as waveguide components. Waveguide circulators and isolators have by far the best electrical characteristics. You can specify insertion loss down to less than 0.2 dB in some cases! Microstrip and coax circulators and isolators might have losses between 0.5 and 1.0 dB. Note that the more bandwidth you ask for, the crummier the insertion loss and isolation will be.

Switchable circulators
A really cool type of circulator is a switchable circulator, in which an electrical signal is used to switch the orientation of the circulator from CW to CCW and vice versa. The way the circulator is constructed it latches into a particular orientation and will stay there in the absence of the electrical signal, say, for instance your power supply goes off. The means for switching the orientation is a single high-current DC pulse that is provided by the driver circuit. This in an expensive technology, but it makes an unbelievably low-loss RF switch with high power handling. Got any good material on circulators and isolators? drop us a line, we want to expand this page into a more useful tutorial!