258

IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 5, MAY 2013

Compact Tri-Band Bandpass Filter Based on Resonators With U-Folded Coupled-Line

Songbai Zhang, Student Member, IEEE, and Lei Zhu, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractThis letter presents a novel compact microstrip triband bandpass lter (BPF) based on resonators. The rst and third passbands are realized by coupling the two dual-band stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) with synthesized frequency response. Meanwhile, the second passband in the middle is uniform impedance achieved by introducing the two coupled resonators (UIRs). A non-uniform coupled-line with the U-folded shape on one line is then proposed to independently achieve the dissimilar external couplings as desired in the tri-passbands. In parallel, the quadruplet topology for each band is formulated by introducing an additional weak I/O cross coupling, thereby bringing one pair of transmission zeros at each side of all the triple passbands, In nal, a tri-band BPF with the central frequencies of 1.8, 3.5, and 5.8 GHz, and respective fractional bandwidths of 7.0%, 5.0%, and 3.5% is designed and fabricated. The measured results show good consistence with the simulated ones. Index TermsQuarter-wavelength resonator, stepped impedance resonator (SIR), tri-band bandpass lter (BPF), U-folded coupled line.

I. INTRODUCTION

ITH the progressive development of the modern wireless communication, the single transceiver system working at multiple frequency bands had attracted great research interests. As one of the critical frontend components, the compact and light-weight tri-band bandpass lter (BPF) is indispensible for the frequency spectrum regulation. Several pioneered works had been devoted to design the tri-band BPFs based on various tri-band resonators, such as the tri-section stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) [1], combined SIRs [2], stub-loaded SIRs [3], tri-band crossed resonators [4], and ring resonator with three pairs of degenerated resonant modes [5]. Mathematic involved modeling of these resonant structures is thereby required to determine the rst three resonant modes based on the prescribed tri-band central frequencies. However, there is no any detailed discussion on independent design of the tri-band external and inter-resonator couplings. To alleviate tri-band coupling design difculties, various novel coupling topologies and structures for the tri-band lters were proposed in [6][8], as one or two resonant structures not only produce self-resonant modes, but also render the appropriate external couplings for the others. Nevertheless, there still lacks design exibility for the rest dual-band inter-resonator and external

couplings; as a result, the coupling structure determination was heavily resorted to time-consuming fullwave simulations. In this letter, a novel compact tri-band BPF based on resonators is presented, which features a preferable merit on independent design of both external and inter-resonator couplings. The synthesized coupling topology is portrayed in Fig. 1(a), where the upper path, contributing the rst and third passbands, is designed by coupling two dual-band SIRs in Fig. 1(b) by the alternative and inverters as discussed herein is implemented with a lumped in [9]. Since the metallic via, its coupling strength monotonically increases with the frequency, the dimensions of SIR shown in Fig. 1(b) is rigorously derived to meet the specied couplings at rst and third central frequencies. In the lower path, two uniform impedance resonators (UIRs) are inductively coupled by a metallic via to form the second passband. With the determination of the resonator structures in Fig. 1(b) and (c), and inter-resonator couplings, and , a non-uniform coupled-line with the U-folded shape on one line is then deployed to provide not only the prescribed external couplings at the triple passbands, but also the weak capacitive I/O cross coupling . This I/O cross coupling causes the out-of-phase cancellation with both upper and lower mainline paths , resulting in a pair of transmission zeros at each side of passbands. To verify our idea, a tri-band BPF with three distinctive central frequencies at 1.8 GHz for 4G LTE, 3.5 GHz for WiMax and 5.8 GHz for WLAN is designed and fabricated on the substrate of Rogers RT/Duriod 6010, whose , , and , the copper thickness is 0.017 mm. The measured frequency responses match well with the simulated ones. II. TRI-BAND BANDPASS FILTER DESIGN A. Upper Path: First and Third Passbands A second-order dual-band Chebyshev BPF for the rst and third passbands with the 20 dB in-band return loss in the upper path is rstly designed based on the dual-band SIR shown in Fig. 1(b). The rst passband possesses the central frequency at and the fractional bandwidth is 7%, while the central frequency for the third passband is and the fractional bandwidth is 3.5%. Based on the classical lter synthesis method, the inter-resonator coupling is derived in (1)

Manuscript received February 02, 2013; accepted March 01, 2013. Date of publication April 04, 2013; date of current version May 06, 2013. The authors are with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (e-mail: [email protected]. edu.sg; [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LMWC.2013.2255868

1531-1309/$31.00 2013 IEEE

ZHANG AND ZHU: COMPACT TRI-BAND BPF BASED ON

RESONATORS WITH U-FOLDED COUPLED-LINE

259

Fig. 2. Extracted Fig. 1. (a) Coupling topology for the proposed tri-band BPF. (b) UIR for the second passband. the rst and third passbands. (c) SIR for

for the rst/third passbands as a function of frequency.

where is the resonators reactance slope, and ( and 2) is the normalized Chebyshev lowpass elements. Herein, a typical metallic via with the diameter of 0.4 mm shown in the inset of Fig. 2 is selected to function as the dual-band inverter, its broadband and associated electrical length are extracted as shown in Fig. 2 [9], where the increases monotonically with the frequency, and . Thus, the dual-band SIR not only necessarily possesses the rst two resonant modes at and , but also achieves the reactance slopes, calculated in (2), thereby satisfying (1) at two frequencies simultaneously
Fig. 3. Extracted external couplings for the rst and third passbands as a function of the height of a U-folded shape. (Inset schematic is not on scale).

(2) where is the impedance ratio of the SIR, which is dened as, , and are the electrical lengths referring to . Therefore, the initial dimensions of the stand-alone SIR are derived as: , , and [10]. The associated electrical lengths of at 1.8 GHz is , which is equal to the physical length of 0.87 mm, and corresponds to the physical length of 0.77 mm at 5.8 GHz. Their frequency-weighted average 0.8 mm is added at the section of the stand-alone SIRs when these two SIRs are inductively coupled together through the . The nal layout of these two inductively coupled SIRs is illustrated in Fig. 5(a). Next, to synthesize the external couplings for the rst and third passbands, a non-uniform coupled-line with the U-folded shape on one line is proposed herein as shown in Fig. 3. As the height, , is initially set as 0, and the coupling gap can be obtained as 0.4 mm based on rst-band . As increases from 0 to 3.5 mm, for the rst passband keeps almost unchanged, while decreases dramatically as is less than 2.0 mm, and increases as is between 2.0 and 3.5 mm, the length of is thus determined as 3.5 mm according to the . The case for is abandoned due to the poor out-of-band performance. Moreover, a small coupled-line section with the length of 0.5 mm and coupling gap of

Fig. 4. Extracted

for the second passband as a function of frequency.

0.1 mm is added to enhance the I/O cross coupling, and create the nite transmission zeros at each side of rst and third passbands. Since this quasi-lump increases monotonically with the frequency, it is impossible to control these two pairs of nite transmission zeros independently. B. Lower Path: Second Passband With the determined upper path, the second passband, centering at 3.5 GHz with a fractional bandwidth of 5%, is designed in the lower path and a uniform impedance resonator (UIR) with the width of 0.3 mm is chosen. According to [9],

260

IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 5, MAY 2013

respectively. As expected in theory, three pairs of nite transmission zeros at 1.25 and 2.27 GHz, 2.68 and 4.01 GHz, 5.10 and 6.18 GHz are clearly demonstrated, and they appear at each side of passbands to highly attenuate the roll-off skirts for all the tri-passbands. Furthermore, with the help of these transmission zeros, excellent band-to-band isolations achieved between the rst and second passbands. In particular, the minimum measured insertion loss at 2.40 GHz is 40.4 dB, whereas the insertion loss between second and third passbands is higher than 12.78 dB with a minimum value at 4.5 GHz. The overall physical circuit size of the fabricated tri-band BPF, including the U-folded coupled-line, is 5.5 mm 26.4 mm, alternatively, it is equivalent to the size of and , where and are the free-space and guided wavelengths of 1.8 GHz. IV. CONCLUSION In this letter, a novel compact microstrip tri-band BPF is proposed and designed based on the dual-band SIRs and UIRs. The SIRs are designed to form the rst and third passbands at 1.8 and 5.8 GHz with respective fractional bandwidths of 7% and 3.5%. Meanwhile, the two UIRs are utilized and connected to independently produce the second passband at 3.5 GHz with a fractional bandwidth of 5%. In practical design, a non-uniform coupled line with the U-folded disconnection is constructed not only to render the external coupling for the triple passbands, but also to introduce the I/O cross couplings with the emergence of three pairs of nite transmission zeros at both sides of each passband. The measured results provide successful verication for the theoretical counterparts. REFERENCES
[1] C.-I. G. Hsu, C.-H. Lee, and Y.-H. Hsieh, Tri-band bandpass lter with sharp passband skirts designed using tri-section SIRs, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 1921, Jan. 2008. [2] C.-H. Lee, C.-I. G. Hsu, and H.-K. Jhuang, Design of a new tri-band microstrip BPF using combined quarter-wavelength SIRs, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 594596, Nov. 2006. [3] W.-Y. Chen, M.-H. Weng, and S.-J. Chang, A new tri-band bandpass lter based on stub-loaded step-impedance resonator, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 179181, Apr. 2012. [4] Q.-X. Chu, F.-C. Chen, Z.-H. Tu, and H. Wang, A novel crossed resonator and its applications to bandpass lters, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 17531759, Jul. 2009. [5] S. Luo, L. Zhu, and S. Sun, Compact dual-mode triple-band bandpass lters using three pairs of degenerate modes in a ring resonator, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 59, no. 5, pp. 12221229, May 2011. [6] X. Zhang, Q. Xue, and B. Hu, Planar tri-band bandpass lter with compact size, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 262264, May 2010. [7] Q.-X. Chu, X.-H. Wu, and F.-C. Chen, Novel compact tri-band bandpass lter with controllable bandwidths, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 21, no. 12, pp. 655657, Dec. 2011. [8] B.-J. Chen, T.-M. Shen, and R.-B. Wu, Design of tri-band lters with improved band allocation, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 17901797, Jul. 2009. [9] S. Zhang and L. Zhu, Synthesis method for even-order symmetrical Chebyshev bandpass lters with alternative J/K inverters and resonators, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 808816, Feb. 2013. [10] W.-S. Chang and C.-Y. Chang, Analytical design of microstrip short-circuit terminated stepped-impedance resonator dual-band lters, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 59, no. 7, pp. 17301739, Jul. 2011.

Fig. 5. (a) Photograph of the fabricated microstrip tri-band BPF with detailed dimensions. (b) Simulated and measured -parameters.

the reactance slope of this UIR is 63.2 , in order to provide 5.25 based on (1) at 3.5 GHz, a the required metallic via with a diameter of 0.6 mm and shunt stub length of 0.5 mm is analytically chosen according to the fullwave extracted parameter as illustrated in Fig. 4. As to couple the two 4 UIRs, their lengths are subtracted by 0.55 mm due to the . The denegative associated electrical length, 6.0 , of tail dimensions of the inductive coupled UIR pair are shown in Fig. 5(a). The previous U-folded coupled-line is also employed to render the single band external coupling for the lower path; the concerned coupling length and gap are obtained as 2.95 and 0.1 mm, respectively. In addition, the design of the lower path structure for the second passband is fully independent from that in the upper path. Lastly, the aforementioned I/O coupling is capable to introduce one pair of nite transmission zeros for the second passband due to the lower quadruplet-section shown in Fig. 1(a). III. EXPERIMENT AND RESULTS DISCUSSION Based on the above discussion, the microstrip tri-band BPF is designed, fabricated and measured. Fig. 5(a) illustrates the photo of the fabricated lter, and Fig. 5(b) plots the fullwave simulated and measured frequency responses in good agreement with each other over the frequency range from 0 to 8.0 GHz. The maximum insertion losses are found to be 0.88, 1.33, and 1.77 dB in the triple passbands at 1.8, 3.5, and 5.8 GHz, and their minimum in-band return losses are 21.3, 15.84, and 15.72 dB,