Small Ultra-Wideband Microstrip Bandpass Filters

with Improved Passband

Thirumalaivasan K and Nakkeeran R

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

Pondicherry Engineering College, Pondicherry-605014, India
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract- An ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip bandpass filter Also, CBCPW technology has the main drawback of
with wide passband and miniaturized size is presented. A unwanted bulk modes due to its parallel-plate modes [25].
modified multiple-mode resonator is formed by transversely In this paper, a UWB bandpass filter with wide
attaching three pairs of non-uniform and folded stubs. Both sides passband is proposed. The advantages of the above filter are:
of high-impedance sections are linked with two feed lines via
1) compact in size with 10.7 mm in length against 16.0 mm in
direct coupled lines, leading to make up a UWB filter. Simulated
results show that the proposed filter can easily cover the band [7] and 12.5mm in [11]; 2) good passband (insertion loss
from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. about 0dB at 6.85 GHz in simulation); 3) wide passband with
3dB cut-off frequency from 2.5-9.5 GHz. The proposed filter
Keywords – Ultra wideband, bandpass filter, microstrip line, offers a wider out-of-band rejection bandwidth and a good
multiple-mode resonator. performance in terms of group delay.

I. INTRODUCTION
The ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless communication
technology has received great attention after the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) decision to permit the
unlicensed operation band from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz in February
2002 [1]. UWB filter is one of the most effective devices used
in controlling the spectrum of radio frequency signals. A
variety of UWB bandpass filters with different geometries and
design methodologies have been developed as one of the key
circuit blocks in UWB systems.
The first major difficulty is to design an UWB filter
Fig.1. Schematic of the proposed UWB bandpass filter-1 on microstrip line.
with about 110% fractional-bandwidth requirement, which
makes some widely used techniques for UWB designs The proposed UWB filters are based on the FR4
inefficient [2]. The second difficulty is due to the requirement substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.4, loss tangent 0.0004
of low insertion loss over the operating band, good and thickness of 1.6 mm. They are characterized and
performance at low frequency and outside the operating band optimally designed using the electromagnetic (EM) simulator
to meet FCC’s limits and a flat group delay performance, IE3D, which is part of the Zeland software package [26].
which is very important in impulse-radio UWB systems. In
this perspective, UWB filters have been increased through II. DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF UWB BANDPASS FILTER
different methods and structures [3–5]. For example, non-
periodical shunt-stub loading [6, 7], composite lowpass- The geometry of the proposed UWB bandpass filter-1
highpass topology [8], cascaded broadside-coupling [9–12], is depicted in Fig. 1. This filter consists of the stub-loaded
circular resonator [13–19] and multiple-mode resonator multiple-mode resonator in the center section and two
(MMR) [20–23] are some popular structures used for UWB identical direct coupled lines in the left and right sections.
filter design. Three pairs of stepped-impedance stubs, namely, cell-1 in
The proposed UWB filters based on MMR technique center and cell-2 in two sides, are transversely attached to the
in this paper yield the response exactly (S11 and S12) as that of middle of the MMR. These stubs produce wide stop bands
[24], which is a band pass filter using conductor backed co- above the UWB passband as illustrated in Fig. 2(b). It is vivid
planar wave guide (CBCPW) back to back transition from the response that the proposed structure offers a wide
structure. Moreover, the existing structure using back to back bandwidth of ~7 GHz and good insertion loss.
transition has a complex design and difficulty in fabrication.
 During design, the dimensions of cell-1 and cell-2 III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
stubs are properly adjusted to obtain their 3-dB cut-off The simulated result of both insertion loss and return
frequencies near 10.0 GHz. As shown in Fig. 2 (a) the middle loss of the band-pass filter-2 is delivered in Fig. 4. Responses
section of the constituted MMR exhibits an excellent lowpass of the figure conveys that the pass-band is of ultra-wide from
property and when this MMR is linked with external feed lines 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, very low and flat insertion loss and the
via direct coupled lines as portrayed in Fig. 1, a desired UWB reflection coefficient is less than 15 dB.
passband with wide upper-stopband is achieved.

Fig.3. UWB bandpass filter-2 on microstrip line.

In order to show the passband performance

noticeably, the S parameter results are plotted in the frequency
range from 2.5 to 11GHz. Fig.5 shows a composite bandpass
filter formulated by integrating a lowpass filter, a highpass
filter and stripline.

(a)

Fig.4. Simulated S parameters of the UWB bandpass filter-2.

(b)
Fig.2 (a). S21 magnitudes of the Cell-1 and Cell-2 elements with stubs-loaded
MMR. (b).Simulated S parameters of the UWB bandpass filter-1.

On the other hand, in order to further improve the

rejection skirt and to meet the FCC defined mask, modified Fig.5. UWB bandpass filter-3 on microstrip line.
UWB bandpass filter-2 is constructed using the basic MMR
structure given in Fig.1. In this design, two adjacent stubs-
loaded-MMRs are coupled with microstrip lines and folded The performance of the filter-3 is shown in Fig. 6.
cells are removed as specified in Fig.3. The gap spacing and Compared with the responses of the above filters, filter 3 has
coupled-line length are properly adjusted, aiming to achieve a an extended bandwidth of 7.4 GHz (or 110 percent) which
better return loss (<-35 dB) within the UWB passband. covers almost the entire UWB. The 3dB bandwidth extends
from 2.5GHz to 11GHz. The group delay, as plotted in Fig. 7
explains a flat frequency response in the pass-band and
demonstrates flat responses for all the simulated structures.
The dimensions of the entire filter structure are only 10.7mm
× 3mm.
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