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A Step-by-Step Approach to Bandpass/Channel Filter Design

Article in International Journal of Electronics Communications and Measurement Engineering · July 2021
DOI: 10.4018/IJECME.2021070101

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 International Journal of Electronics, Communications, and Measurement Engineering
Volume 10 • Issue 2 • July-December 2021

A Step-by-Step Approach to
Bandpass/Channel Filter Design
Augustine O. Nwajana, University of Greenwich, UK
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6591-5269

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a step-by-step approach to the design of bandpass/channel filters. The chapter
serves as a reference source to microwave stakeholders with little or no filter design experience. It
should help them design and implement their first filter device using the microstrip technology. A
3-pole Chebyshev bandpass filter (BPF) with centre frequency of 2.6 GHz, fractional bandwidth of
3%, passband ripple of 0.04321 dB, and return loss of 20 dB has been designed, implemented, and
simulated. The designed filter implementation is based on the Rogers RT/Duroid 6010LM substrate
with a 10.7 dielectric constant and 1.27 mm thickness. The circuit model and microstrip layout results
of the BPF are presented and show good agreement. The microstrip layout simulation results show
that a less than 1.8 dB minimum insertion loss and a greater than 25 dB in-band return loss were
achieved. The overall device size of the BPF is 18.0 mm by 10.7 mm, which is equivalent to 0.16λg x
0.09λg, where λg is the guided wavelength of the 50 Ohm microstrip line at the filter centre frequency.

KEywoRDS
Bandpass, Channel Filter, Circuit Modelling, Coupling, Hairpin, J-Inverter, Microstrip, Resonator

1. INTRoDUCTIoN

A channel filter, also known as bandpass filter (BPF) passes frequencies within a single band and
rejects all other frequencies outside the band (Nwajana, Dainkah, & Yeo, 2017). This type of filter is
widely used as the building block in the design of complex and multi-port circuits and systems. Some
of the more complex devices that can be formed from BPFs include filtering antennas (Liu, Leung,
& Yang, 2020; Wei, Zhao, & Shi, 2019), multi-band filters (Nwajana, 2020; Yeo & Nwajana, 2013;
Hou, Liu, B. Zhang, Song, Wu, J. Zhang, & He, 2020), filtering power dividers (Nwajana, Otuka,
Ebenuwa, Ihianle, Aneke, & Edoh, 2020; Dainkeh, Nwajana, & Yeo, 2016), diplexers (Nwajana
&Yeo, 2016; Nwajana, Dainkeh, & Yeo, 2018), etc. Figure 1 shows the response from a bandpass
filter that passes all signal components between a lower frequency limit, fL and an upper frequency
limit, fH, while attenuating and rejecting all other signal components that fall outside the fL and fH
band. A bandpass filter can be formed by combining a lowpass filter with a highpass filter. Bandpass
filters are widely used in radio frequency (RF) front end of cellular radio base station transceivers.
Its main function in the transmitter is to limit the bandwidth of the output signal to the band assigned
for the transmission. By this, the transmitter is prevented from interfering with other stations. In the

DOI: 10.4018/IJECME.2021070101

Copyright © 2021, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

1
International Journal of Electronics, Communications, and Measurement Engineering
Volume 10 • Issue 2 • July-December 2021

Figure 1. Channel/bandpass filter characteristics

receiver, a bandpass filter permits signals within a certain band of frequencies to be received and
decoded, while stopping signals at undesirable frequencies from getting through.
Many authors have reported BPFs designed and implemented using various transmission line
technologies including waveguides (Shi, Zhang, Zhou, Feng, Cao, & Che, 2019; Dahle, Laforge, &
Kuhling, 2017; AbuHussain & Hasar, 2020), microstrip (Huang, Wang, & Zhu, 2016; Nwajana &
Yeo, 2016; Cai, Wang, Zhu, & Wu, 2016; Zhang, Liu, Chen, Weng, & Yang, 2020), and substrate
integrated waveguide (Qui, Wu, Xie, Yin, & Mao, 2018; Azad & Mohan, 2018; S. Hu, Y. Hu, Zheng,
Zhu, Gao, & Zhang, 2020). The BPF presented in this paper is based on the microstrip technology. The
filter relies on the microstrip hairpin resonator to achieve compact size. It is also of high selectivity
and sharp roll-off. Some filter design characteristics such as selectivity, cost, size, sensitivity to
environmental effects, power handling capacity, in-band and out-of-band performance metrics, are
critical specifications in the development of RF and microwave communication front end devices.
Filter developers are often required to make compromise between several conflicting requirements
as it is rather difficult or even physically and/or electrically impossible to simultaneously achieve all
design criteria or specifications. For instance, achieving higher channel selectivity usually requires
the use of more resonators, which will result in higher insertion loss along the transmission path since
insertion loss is approximately proportional to the number of resonators used in the construction of
a filter (Nwajana & Yeo, 2020). Hence, care must be taken when selecting design specifications to
meet the most critical design targets.
Some popular manufacturing techniques that have been employed in fabricating filters include
printed circuit board (PCB) (Nwajana, Yeo, & Dainkeh, 2016), low temperature co-fired ceramic
(LTCC) (Wong, Wang, Chen, & Chu, 2014) and liquid crystal polymer (LCP) (Dalmia, White,
Sundaram, & Swaminathan, 2004). In terms of low cost and commercial availability, the PCB wins
and hence, has been utilized in the fabrication of the BPF reported in this paper.

2. FILTER CIRCUIT MoDEL

The BPF circuit model was established from the standard normalized 3-pole Chebyshev lowpass
prototype filter shown in Figure 2 (Nwajana, 2017), where g is the element value for the filter. Some
typical element values for Chebyshev lowpass prototype filters are given in Table 1 (Hong, 2011),
for different passband ripples L Ar, and filter order of 1 to 9. The proposed BPF is designed to have a
center frequency, f0 of 2.6 GHz, a fractional bandwidth of 3%, a passband ripple of 0.04321 dB, and
a passband return loss of 20 dB.
The first step to designing the BPF circuit model is to transform the 3rd order lowpass prototype
filter of Figure 2 into the BPF circuit shown in Figure 3. The transformation is based on Equations

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