1 Anaren Microwave, Inc East Syracuse, NY 13057 USA 2 Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244 USA hpartal@ieee.org
Abstract A low cost and compact microstrip bandpass filter with high selectivity and suppressed harmonic is introduced in this paper. A simple hairpin resonators filter is manipulated to obtain the desired filter performance. Line widths of the resonators are perturbated to adjust odd mode phase velocities in order to lower the higher order modes. Furthermore, by implementing a proper cross coupling from input or output to nonadjacent coupled sections, virtually a quintuplet coupling scheme is realized to improve the filter selectivity. Then the final improved hairpin filter has a sharp cut-off, a low spurious level, and still has the same compact size. The proposed combined technique is very attractive for variety of miniature filter applications. A sample filter is designed for this purpose and it can be adopted in variety of wireless subassemblies including low power radio carriers, mobile communications, and WIMAX applications. I. INTRODUCTION Planar filters are widely used in RF and microwave applications for their advantages in cost, size, manufacturing easiness, and adaptability to variety of microwave assemblies. Microstrip coupled line bandpass filters carry most of these advantages. However, because of the asymmetric dielectric mediums above and below the transmission lines, the odd mode and even mode phase velocity differences result in additional spurious pass band at even multiples of the main band. Edge coupled line filters become compact in size when their resonators are folded. However, the spurious pass region becomes closer to the main band and the filters selectivity becomes degraded. Some techniques are already reported in literature to eliminate the harmonics of a coupled line filter [1], [2], and [3]. One of the effective techniques employs wiggly lines to increase the path for the odd mode phase without altering the pass region much. There are also techniques to improve the selectivity by adding cross coupled sections [4] and [5]. Cross coupling can be realized in most type of microwave filters and a direct synthesis of cross coupled filters is published by Levy [6]. This paper introduces a combined technique by utilizing the two techniques explained above. Initially an edge coupled line filter is designed and its resonators are folded for compactness. The first resonator section is replaced by tapped input lines that decreased the overall size further. This also eliminates narrowly spaced first coupled line section which makes etching easier. Then continuous line width perturbations are applied to eliminate the first harmonic of the filter. Once this is achieved, a high impedance cross coupled strip from the source or load to the center hairpin resonator is extended in order to add a transmission zero around the pass region. The resulting filter that is proposed is very attractive for its miniature size and high performance. The filter development phases are shown in Fig. 1.
(a)
(b)
(c) Fig. 1. New filter development phases: (a) Typical hairpin resonator filter, (b) Wiggly line hairpin resonator filter, (c) Cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter. 28-30 September 2010, Paris, France Proceedings of the 40th European Microwave Conference 978-2-87487-016-3 2010 EuMA 1265 II. FILTER DESIGN Coupled line filter manipulations are explained step by step to present the improvements achieved. First, a microstrip parallel coupled line bandpass filter of fifth order is designed and simulated using Agilent Genesys software, 2.4GHz to 2.7GHz, [7]. 30 mil duroid/RT substrate of dielectric constant 2.2 is used to build the microstrip transmission lines. Since parallel coupled lines occupy large space, the resonators can be fold as shown in Fig. 1a, without any significant impact on filter response as seen in simulation results of Fig. 2a. It is seen that the microstrip parallel coupled line filter has pass band re-entrance at about two times the center frequency. Furthermore, folding the resonators degrades the ideal parallel coupled line filter response. The resultant filter is compact; however second harmonic becomes closer to the main pass band region and selectivity is not as good.
(a)
0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00 Freq [GHz] -65.00 -60.00 -55.00 -50.00 -45.00 -40.00 -35.00 -30.00 -25.00 -20.00 -15.00 -10.00 -5.00 0.00 d B ( S ( P o r t A , P o r t B ) )
(b)
Fig. 2. Coupled line bandpass filters: (a) Parallel coupled lines simulated in AWR (b) Optimized folded coupled line (hairpin) filter simulated in Ansoft HFSS.
An optimization is attempted to reduce the harmonic level as seen in Fig. 2b. However, due to nature of plain microstrip hairpin filter, the spurious behaviour remains. Then, a filter modification will be studied here to improve the selectivity and reduce the second harmonic level in next section.
III. BAND PASS FILTER WITH HARMONIC REJECTION AND HIGH SELECTIVITY The hairpin resonators in Fig. 1a can be modified by applying continuous linewidth perturbations following a sinusoidal law. This will adjust the odd mode phase velocity compared to the even mode one. Detailed line perturbation analysis can be found in [1]. Then, a new hairpin resonator with wiggly lines of Fig. 1b is generated and simulation results are shown in Fig 3. Based on simulations, the wiggly line filter successfully reduced the spurious harmonic level down to -34dB. Although no significant degradation in the pass region is observed, the filter in Fig. 3 can easily be optimized to fine tune the filter matching in order to reduce the ripples in the main band.
0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00 Freq [GHz] -65.00 -60.00 -55.00 -50.00 -45.00 -40.00 -35.00 -30.00 -25.00 -20.00 -15.00 -10.00 -5.00 0.00 d B ( S ( P o r t A , P o r t B ) )
Fig. 3. The wiggly line filters simulated response in Ansoft HFSS.
The next step would be improving the filters selectivity. A usual method for sharp band-stop response is using dielectric resonators as in [8]. However, if relatively moderate Q is sufficient, a cost effective solution by adding a cross coupling strip can be introduced. Synthesis and analysis techniques of cross coupling can partly be found in [4], [5], and [6]. Cross coupling line is extended from source or load resonator end through the central sections cavity as seen in Fig. 1c. This scheme virtually becomes a quintuplet coupling. The cross coupling strip can be designed to have a transmission zero on lower and/or upper edge of the pass band. The strip length is designed 180 degrees long at the frequency of interest. The additional transmission zero next to the pass region provides a sharp cut-off without hurting the pass band region as seen in Fig 4. The final cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter shown in Fig. 1c can further be optimized to improve the return loss that would reduce the ripples in the pass band region. It would also be possible to improve the stop band region by minor optimization or tuning. 1266
0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00 Freq [GHz] -65.00 -60.00 -55.00 -50.00 -45.00 -40.00 -35.00 -30.00 -25.00 -20.00 -15.00 -10.00 -5.00 0.00 d B ( S ( P o r t A , P o r t B ) )
Fig. 4. Cross coupled wiggly line band pass filter with low spurious and high selectivity simulated in Ansoft HFSS.
IV. FILTER MANUFACTURING AND MEASUREMENTS The microstrip filters were built using an LPKF milling machine and the assembled boards are shown in Fig. 5. Note that the filter dimensions can be obtained by using the drawing given in Appendix. In that drawing, the final filter is shown with grid background and dimensions can be obtained by scaling the picture in AutoCAD.
Fig. 5. Three manufactured filters: Plain hairpin resonator filter (left), wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (center), and cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (right).
The filters were measured by locating them in a proper metallic enclosure to provide sufficient grounding and control the radiation leakages and overall performance. The measurement results (imported s2p data files from a network analyzer) are shown in Fig. 6. It is seen that the measured results agree with the simulations (Figs. 24) very well. Based on measured results, the following comments are derived:
Fig. 6. Measurement results of the developed filters shown in Fig 5: (a) Plain hairpin resonator filter, (b) wiggly line hairpin resonator filter, and (c) cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter. 1267 Frequency (GHz) g g ( ) -30 -25 -20 -15 -10 -5 0 Frequency (GHz) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Fig. 7. Measured return loss of wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (solid line) and cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (dashed line).
(a) Plain hairpin resonator filter has about 1dB insertion loss and low reflection in 2.4 to 2.7GHz band. However out-of-band behaviour on high end is not preferable because of high spurs at every multiple of the center frequency. The optimizations can only reduce the second harmonic down to -18dB. (b) Wiggly line hairpin resonators significantly reduce the second harmonic by at least 17 dB at around 5GHz without hurting the pass band performance much. Only a few small ripples due to some additional return loss (Fig. 7) were observed in the pass region. When return loss is tuned the ripple magnitude would be lower. On the other hand, the bandwidth becomes wider by about 100MHz, from 2.35 to 2.75GHz. (c) The high impedance cross coupled line of one wavelength adds a transmission zero at the band edge. This provides a very sharp cut-off without noticeable in-band degradation. The same small ripples explained in (b) were maintained in band from 2.35 to 2.75GHz. By employing the cross coupled line along with wiggly resonators, a high performance filter with high selectivity and reduced second harmonic is obtained. As seen in Fig 6c, the second harmonic has been reduced by at least 12 dB. (d) A trade off with sharp cut-off and magnitude of spurious rejection can be pronounced. However, it has been observed that harmonic rejection is only degraded by about 5 dB with the cross coupled line. (e) The new cross coupled wiggly line hairpin filter is tunable and, further return loss improvement for lower ripples in band is possible. (f) If extremely high Q-factor is not needed, cross coupled lines can be used in place of dielectric resonators as they do not increase size and cost. V. CONCLUSIONS A new high performance microstrip bandpass filter is proposed. The technique applies to miniature hairpin resonator filters by perturbating resonator line widths and adding a proper cross coupling strip from the source/load to a resonator section. The final filter is compact size with low spurious and sharp cut-off response. It is a cost effective solution for high performance filter applications. APPENDIX Filter dimensions can be obtained by using the drawing given below. The microstrip filter of Fig. 1c is displayed with a grid background and dimensions can be obtained by scaling the picture in AutoCAD. Here, each grid is 0.1 inch square and line width of the cross coupled line is 8 mils.
Scalable filter drawing with grid background.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author wishes to thank his colleagues, Chong Mei and Luke Murphy for their support on this paper. REFERENCES [1] T. Lopetegi, M. A. G. Laso, J. Hernndez, M. Bacaicoa, D. Benito, M. J. Garde, M. Sorolla, and M. Guglielmi, New microstrip Wiggly line filters with spurious passband suppression, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 49, pp. 1593-1598, Sept. 2001. [2] J.-T. Kuo, S.-P. Chen, and M. Jiang, Parallel-coupled-microstrip filters with over-coupled end stages for suppression of spurious responses, IEEE Microwave Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 13, pp. 440-442, Oct. 2003. [3] W.M. Fathelbab,, M.B. Steer, Parallel-coupled line filters with enhanced stopband performances, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory and Tech., vol. 53, pp. 3774- 3781, Dec. 2005. [4] J. -C. Lu, C. -K. Liao, and C. -Y. Chang, Microstrip Parallel-Coupled Filters With Cascade Trisection and Quadruplet Responses, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 56, pp. 2101-2110, Sept. 2008. [5] C. C. Yang and C. Y. Chang, Microstrip cascade trisection filter, IEEE Microw. Guided Wave Lett., vol. 9, pp. 271-- -273, July 1999.. [6] R. Levy, Direct synthesis of cascaded quadruplets (CQ) filters, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 43, pp. 2940-2945, Dec. 1995. [7] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1998. [8] H. P. Partal, The usage of dielectric resonator filters in microwave synthesizers applications. IEEE Annual Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference, WAMICON '06, 4-5 Dec. 2006. 0.1 1268