A Wide Stopband CPW Low Pass Filter Using

Quarter Wavelength Stepped Impedance Resonators

Hao-Jia Lin, Xiao-Qun Chen, Xiao-Wei Shi, Lei Chen and Yan-Fu Bai
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Antennas and Microwaves, Xidian University
Xian 710071, Shaanxi China
Abstract-A novel wide stopband coplanar waveguide (CPW)
low pass filter (LPF) using quarter wavelength stepped
impedance resonators (SIR) is presented. The bandstop
characteristics of the quarter wavelength short circuited stubs
SIR are demonstrated. By cascading three tapered quarter
wavelength short circuited stubs SIR and a CPW spurline
resonator, the fabricated low pass filter has sharp rejection with
cutoff frequency of 3.5 GHz, and deep attenuation from 3.7 GHz
to 11 GHz lower than -24 dB. Good agreement between
simulated and measured results is demonstrated.
I. INTRODUCTION
In order to suppress the spurious responses in many
communication and radar systems, low pass filter (LPF) with
harmonic suppression and wide stopband characteristics have
been highly required. Several design approaches have been
proposed [1-5]. Due to its bandgap characteristics, the
electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure and defected ground
structure (DGS) have been taken much more attention to use
in extending the stopband [1-3]. However, it is easily
influenced by the environment for it disturbs the distributing
of the current in the ground plane that it is inconvenient to use.
In Ref.[4] and [5], another method is introduced to extend the
stopband of the microstrip bandpass filter by using quarter
wavelength stepped impedance resonators (SIR). But the short
end of the microstrip quarter wavelength has to be realized via
a drilling hole.
In fact, coplanar waveguide (CPW) is much more suitable
for quarter wavelength short end due to its uniplanar structure.
And it has attracted more and more attention for its advantages
such as easy connections in series and shunt without via hole,
insensitivity to substrate thickness, and low dispersion effect
in the design of microwave and millimeter wave circuits [6, 7].
Besides, using the SIR, it can reduce the size of the quarter
wavelength, and improve the out band suppression [8].
In this paper, a wide stopband CPW low pass filter using
quarter wavelength stepped impedance resonators and a CPW
spurline resonator is presented. The characteristics of the
quarter wavelength short end SIR are researched. With a CPW
feeding excitation, the structure can achieve a stopband
property with two frequency attenuation poles. In order to
extend the stopband of the proposed LPF, three tapered
quarter wavelength short circuit stubs SIR and a CPW spurline
resonator are cascaded. It can obtain a sharp cutoff at the 3.5
GHz and a desire stopband wide from 3.7 GHz to 11 GHz
lower than -24 dB. The EM simulated and measured results
are offered to demonstrate the characteristics of the wide
stopband CPW low pass filter.
II. FILTER DESIGN
A. Cell of CPW Quarter Wavelength SIR
A pair of the proposed CPW quarter wavelength SIR
structure with a CPW feeding line is illustrated in Fig.1. It is
realized on a single layer metallic substrate. The two quarter
wavelength short circuited stubs are symmetrically arranged at
the two sides of the input/output CPW central conductor with
the distance v
1
. The narrower line section of high impedance
connected to the ground directly with the length h
1
and width
m
1
, while the section of low impedance with a gap g
1
away
from the ground has a length l
1
and width t
1
.
Figure 1. A pair of CPW quarter wavelength SIR
From the simulated result shown in Fig.2, the bandstop
characteristics of the CPW quarter wavelength short circuited
stubs SIR are clearly demonstrated. A wide stopband with two
frequency attenuation poles is achieved. The center frequency
of the bandstop filter could be decided by the length of quarter
wavelength SIR. As it is well-known, the resonance condition
of the quarter wavelength stepped impedance resonator is
expressed as [9, 10]
1 2
tan( ) tan( )
z
R = (1)
Where
1
is the electric length of the wider line section which
has low impedance Z
1
, while
2
is the narrower line section
with high impedance Z
2
, and R
z
is the impedance ratio defined
by
1 2
/
z
R Z Z = (2)
62 978-1-4244-5708-3/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE ICMMT 2010 Proceedings
Figure2. Simulated results of the quarter wavelength SIR with dimensions: w
= 1.6 mm, s = 0.5 mm, h1 = 2 mm, l1 = 4 mm, v1 = 0.2 mm, t1 = 6 mm, m1 = 2
mm, and g1 = 0.5 mm.
According to the EM simulated results, it illustrates that the
lower frequency attenuation pole is mainly influenced by the
width m
1
of the narrower line section, while the higher
frequency attenuation pole is chiefly affected by the length l
1
of the wider line section. To simplify the following analysis,
the dimensions of the CPW quarter wavelength SIR are as
follow: h
1
= 0.5 mm, v
1
= 0.5 mm, t
1
= 4 mm, g
1
= 0.5 mm.
While the other two dimension parameters m
1
and l
1
are
simulated as varieties. Fig.3 shows the frequency responses
with the parameter m
1
varies from 0.5 mm to 2 mm and l
1
= 4
mm. It demonstrates that low frequency attenuation pole shifts
from 4.8 GHz to 5.7 GHz when the width m
1
of the narrower
line section increases, while has relatively little effect on the
higher frequency attenuation pole. The simulated results of the
proposed cell of CPW quarter wavelength SIR with parameter
l
1
changes from 3 mm to 4.5 mm and m
1
= 0.5 mm is depicted
in Fig.4. As the length l
1
increased, the lower attention pole
reduces from 5.2 GHz to 4.3 GHz, while the higher attention
Figure 3. Frequency responses of the proposed cell with parameter m1 varies
from 0.5 mm to 2 mm
Figure 4. Simulated results of the proposed cell of CPW quarter wavelength
SIR with parameter l1 changes from 3 mm to 4.5 mm
pole slows down quicker from 7.5 GHz to 5.9 GHz.
As these characteristics demonstrated above, a stopband filter
with desired attenuation poles are achieved. Besides, in order
to obtain a much sharper cutoff in the design of the proposed
CPW wide stopband low pass filter, some simulated results
have been done. The semi-perimeter R
s
of the wider line
section is calculated by
1 1 s
R l t = + (3)
Fig.5 depicts the simulated S-Parameters of the proposed cell
with the parameter t
1
varies from 4 mm to 6 mm, while the
semi-perimeter R
s
, which is set as 9 mm, keeps constant. As
the width t
1
of the wider line section increased and the length
l
1
reduced, the two frequency attenuation poles shift to lower
frequency range. While the 3 dB bandwidth of the bandstop
filter without any influence. In other words, the cutoff
characteristic of the low pass filter would become much
sharper when the wider t
1
increased and the semi-perimeter R
s
fixed.
Figure 5. Simulated S-Parameters of the proposed cell for various dimension
parameter t1 with the semi-perimeter Rs of the wider line set as 9 mm
63
B. Wide Stopband CPW Low Pass Filter
As analyzed above, the cell structure of the quarter
wavelength SIR can be used for low pass filter design and
spurious passband suppression. However, just only one cell
could not achieve the desired stopband and sufficient
suppression. Therefore, three tapered quarter wavelength short
circuit stubs SIR and a CPW spurline resonator are cascaded.
The configuration of the CPW spurline resonator, which is
etched two symmetric spurlines on the CPW central conductor,
is shown in Fig.6 [11, 12]. The resonator frequency is mainly
controlled by the length f
1
. Fig.7 illustrates the transmission
characteristics of the CPW spurline resonator when f
1
varies
from 5 mm to 7 mm, while other parameters are: w = 1.6 mm,
s = 0.5 mm, f
2
= 0.3 mm, e
1
= 0.5 mm, e
2
= 0.3 mm. When the
parameter f
1
increases, the resonator frequency slows down
from 6.4 GHz to 4.6 GHz. It is concluded that the CPW
spurline resonator provides obvious bandgap characteristics
with one resonator frequency, and the resonant frequency is
controlled by adjusting the length f
1
.
Figure 6. Structure of the CPW spurline resonator
Figure 7. Simulated results of the CPW spurline resonator with length f1 varies
from 5 mm to 7 mm
Fig.8 depicts the structure of the proposed wide stopband
CPW low pass filter. It is consisted of a CPW spurline
resonator and three cells of CPW quarter wavelength SIR with
different dimensions. As analysis above, the cell of CPW
quarter wavelength SIR has a bandstop characteristic with two
controllable frequency attenuation poles, and the CPW
spurline resonator has one controllable frequency attenuation
pole.
Figure 8. Structure of the proposed wide stopband CPW low pass filter
Using the commercial software Ansoft HFSS based on the
finite element method. The dimensions of the proposed wide
stopband filter are optimized based on the analysis of single
quarter wavelength SIR in Fig.1 and CPW spurline resonator
in Fig.6. The final optimized parameter values of the filter are
as follows: w = 1.6 mm, s = 0.5 mm, l
1
= 5 mm, l
2
= 2.3 mm,
l
3
= 1.7 mm, h
1
= 2 mm, h
2
= 1 mm, h
3
= 1 mm, g
1
= g
2
= g
3
=
0.5 mm, v
1
= v
2
= v
3
=0.2 mm, t
1
= 5 mm, t
2
= 4 mm, t
3
= 2.2
mm, m
1
= 4 mm, m
2
= 1 mm, m
3
= 1 mm, d
1
= 6.2 mm, d
2
= 8
mm, d
3
= 7.4 mm, f
1
= 4.6 mm, f
2
= 0.3 mm, e
1
= 0.3 mm, and
e
2
= 0.5 mm.
III. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
To validate the proposed wide stopband CPW low pass filter,
it is simulated and fabricated on a substrate with a relative
permittivity of 9.6 and a thickness of 1 mm. The input/output
impedance of the feeding line is identical to 50 ohm
corresponding to the coplanar wavelength which has a central
strip width w = 1.7 mm and a slot width s = 0.5 mm. Fig.9
shows the photograph of the fabricated CPW low pass filter
with dimensions of 3060 mm
2
. The measurements are carried
out on Agilent Vector network analyzer of N5230A. Fig.10
illustrates the measured results of the CPW low pass filter
with the EM simulated results. It is obviously that the
measured results have good agreement with the simulated
results. The experiment results demonstrate that the fabricated
CPW low pass filter has a 3 dB cut off frequency at 3.5 GHz
Figure 9. Photograph of the proposed CPW low pass filter
64
Figure 10. The measured and simulated frequency responses for the proposed
CPW low pass filter
with insertion loss of the pass band is about 0.4 dB. It has a
good frequency selection for there is a sharp slot from 3.5
GHz to 3.9 GHz, with a wide stopband from 3.7 GHz to 11
GHz lower than -24 dB.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a CPW low pass filter with wide stopband is
theoretically modeled and experimentally verified. It is
consisted of a CPW spurline resonator and three tapered CPW
quarter wavelength short circuited SIR. The characteristics of
the CPW quarter wavelength SIR and the CPW spurline
resonator are analyzed. A CPW low pass filter with cutoff
frequency of 3.5 GHz is fabricated for validation. The cutoff
frequency response is sharp and the insertion loss is low with
stopband from 3.7 GHz to 11 GHz which is suppressed better
than -24 dB. We believe the proposed low pass filter would be
widely used to suppress the spurious responses which are
usually generated in RF/Microwave nonlinear devices.
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