Compact Microstrip Lowpass Filter with Wide

Stopband Using Nonuniform Radial Stubs

Zixuan Ning, Yongle Wu, Weimin Wang, Yuanan Liu and Jianguo Yu
Beijing Key Laboratory of Work Safety Intelligent Monitoring, School of Electronic Engineering,
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
P.O. Box 282, 100876, Beijing, China
Yuanan Liu: [email protected], Zixuan Ning: [email protected]

Abstract—A compact microstrip lowpass filter with a wide dielectric constant of 2.65. As shown in Fig. 1, the proposed
stopband is proposed in this paper. To achieve wide stopband lowpass filter is consisted of four radial stubs, four
suppression and compact size, nonuniform radial stubs are transmission lines, and two ports. Rsi (i=1,2,3,4) and Tlinej
adopted. The proposed lowpass filter is composed of four (j=0,1,2,3,4) are used to describe the four radial stubs and
nonuniform radial stubs, four transmission lines, and two transmission lines, respectively. The structure of Rsi and Tlinej
standard ports. A filter with the 3-dB cutoff frequency of 900 are shown in Fig.2, and the corresponding parameters are
MHz is fabricated and measured. The fabricated lowpass filter is described as și, Rli, Rwi, Tlj, and Twj, (i=1,2,3,4, j=0,1,2,3,4).
able to suppress the ninth-harmonic frequency response with a
stopband rejection from 1.65 GHz to 8.5 GHz better than 20 dB.
In addition, there is a good agreement between the simulated and
measured results.

Keywords—lowpass filter; wide stopband; nonuniform radial

stubs

I. INTRODUCTION
Lowpass filters are used to reject unwanted harmonics and Fig. 1. Structure of the proposed lowpass filter
spurious signals. Due to the easy fabrication and convenient
integration with other microwave circuits, much attention has
been paid to planar lowpass filters. And lowpass filters with
compact size and high performance are in great demand for
communication systems.
Conventional lowpass filters using a cascade connection of
high and low characteristic impedance transmission lines [1]
have been widely used in microwave systems. Different
Fig. 2. Structure of Rsi and Tlinej
methods have been used to design lowpass filters with good
performance. For instance, defected ground structure (DGS) The structure parameters of Rsi are listed in Table I, while
[2-4], stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) [5], as well as the parameters of Tlinej are shown in Table II.
electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) [6, 7], are commonly used to
get high-performance lowpass filters. Another microstrip Fig.3 shows the photograph of the proposed lowpass filter.
lowpass filter symmetrically loaded with triangular and high- The measured results are carried out on an Agilent N5230C
low impedance resonators has been designed in [8]. The radial network analyzer. Fig.4 shows the simulated and measured S-
stubs have been widely used in microstrip circuits to provide a parameters results, which exhibits good agreements. As is
low impedance level at a well specified insertion point in a shown in Fig. 4, the measured 3 dB cutoff frequency is about
wide frequency band, and have been used to achieve the sharp 900 MHz, and spurious frequencies from 1.65 GHz to 8.5
response, compact size and wide stopband in [9-11]. GHz have been suppressed with a good suppression more than
20 dB, indicating that the proposed lowpass filter is able to
In this paper, a novel microstrip lowpass filter using non- suppress the ninth-harmonic response. We can also find the
uniform radial stubs and transmission lines has been designed, proposed lowpass filter has a sharp transition domain and a
showing a perfect property at sharp response, compact size wide stopband response from Fig. 4. The group delay of the
and wide stopband. The designed filter has been simulated, proposed lowpass filter is depicted in Fig. 5. The measured
fabricated and measured. There is a good agreement between group delay in passband is about 0.7 ns. The simulated one is
the simulated and measured results. also around 0.7 ns. Good agreement between simulation and
measurement is indicated. In order to highlight the innovations
II. CIRCUIT DESIGN AND MEASURED RESULTS and advantages, a comparison of the proposed lowpass filter
In this paper, the proposed lowpass filter is fabricated on and several similar reported filters are compared in Table III.
the F4B substrate with a thickness of 1 mm and a relatively

978-1-4799-8897-6/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 521
 TABLE I. THE STRUCTURE PARAMETERS OF RSi tolerances and the error of measurement accuracy, some small
i Rwi(mm) Rli(mm) și(嘙) discrepancies are presented between the simulated and
1 3 18 75 measured responses. Meanwhile, both the measured and the
2 1.3 10 60 simulated group delay of passband are 0.7 ns, which shows
3 0.6 6.15 113.8 perfect agreement between the simulated results and the
4 0.82 5 100 measured ones. With these good performances, this proposed
lowpass filter can be used in a wide range of microwave and
TABLE II. THE STRUCTURE PARAMETERS OF Tlinej millimeter wave applications.
j Twj(mm) Tlj(mm)
0 2.7 6 TABLE III. COMPARISONS OF THE PROPOSED FILTER AND OTHER
1 0.5 10 REPORTED ONES
2 0.3 20
3 1.5 3 Narrow-width Design
Refs. Methods
lines Complexity
4 0.5 7
Very
[8] Resonators Yes
Complicated
semicircle
[10] Yes Simple
ended stubs
uniform Very
[11] Yes
radial stubs Complicated
nonuniform
This work No Simple
radial stubs

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Fig. 3. Photograph of the fabricated lowpass filter
This work was supported in part by National Natural
0 Science Foundation of China (No. 61327806)㧘 and National
-5
S11-simulated
Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (No.
-10
S21-simulated 2014CB339900).
-15
S11-measured
Magnitude (dB)

-20
S21-measured
-25 REFERENCES
-30
[1] David M. Pozar, “Microwave Engineering”, 2005, chapters 6 and 8.
-35
[2] X. Q. Chen, L. H. Weng and X. Shi, “Novel complementary split ring
-40
resonantor DGS for low-pass filter design,” Microwave Opt Technol
-45
Lett, Vol. 51, No.7, pp. 1748-1751, Jul, 2009.
-50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 [3] X. Q. Chen, R. Li, S. J. Shi, Q. Wang, L. Xu, and X. W. Shi, “A novel
Frequency (GHz) lowpass filter using elliptic shape defected ground structure,” Prog.
Fig. 4. Simulated and measured S-parameters of the fabricated lowpass filter Electromagn. Res. B, Vol.9, pp. 117-126, 2008.
[4] J. Chen, Z.-B.Weng, Y.-C. Jiao, and F.-S. Zhang, “Lowpass filter design
5
of hilbert curve ring defected ground structure,” Prog. Electromagn.
4 Res., Vol.70, pp.269-280,2007.
3
[5] M. H. Yang, J. Xu, Q. Zhao, L. Peng, and G.P. Li,“Compact, broad-
2 stopband lowpass filters using SIRs-loaded circular hairpin resonators,”
Group Delay (ns)

1 Prog. Electromagn. Res., Vol. 102, pp. 95-106, 2010.

0 [6] C. F. Su, X. Q. Qi, and Z. B. Yang, “Design of UWB bandpass filter
-1 using highpass and dual-plane EBG lowpass filters,” IEEE Int. Conf.
measured
-2
simulated
Appl. Supercond. Electromagn. Devices, ASEMD, Beijing, China,
-3 pp.149-152, Oct. 2013.
-4 [7] S. Y. Huang, and Y .H. Lee, “A small-size dual-plane EBG microstrip
-5 lowpass filter with a U-shaped microstrip line geometry,” Proc. 2005
0.0 0.4 0.8 1.2 1.6 2.0
Frequency (GHz) IEEE Int. Worksh. on Radio-Freq. Integr. Technol. Integr. Circ.
Wideband Comm. and Wirel. Sensor Netw. RFIT 2005, Singapore,
Fig. 5. Measured and simulated passband group delay of the fabricated pp.195-197, Nov .30 -Dec. 2, 2005.
lowpass filter
[8] J. -P. Wang, L. Ge, Y.- X. Guo, and W. Wu, “Miniaturised microstrip
lowpass filter with broad stopband and sharp roll-off,” Electron. Lett.,
Vol. 46, No.8, pp.573-575, 2010.
III. CONCLUSIONS [9] D. W. Gardner, and M. A. Wichert, “Microwave filter design using
A novel compact lowpass filter based on nonuniform radial line stubs,” IEEE Reg 5 Conf, Vol.1988, pp.68-72, 1988.
radial stubs and transmission lines is designed, fabricated, and [10] M. Hayati, H. A.-D. Memari, and H. Abbasi, “Compact microstrip
measured in this paper. The measured results of the designed lowpass filter with sharp roll-off and wide stopband using semicircle
ended stub resonator,”, Prog. Electromagn. Res. Lett., Vol. 35, pp. 73-
lowpass filter indicate a good performance of compact size 81, 2012.
and wide stopband. The proposed filter has a 3-dB cutoff [11] K. Ma, and K. S. Yeo, “New ultra-wide stopband low-pass filter using
frequency at 900 MHz, and is able to suppress the ninth- transformed radial stubs,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., Vol. 59,
harmonic frequency response. Due to the various fabrication No.3, pp.604-611, Mar. 2011.

522 2015 IEEE 4th Asia-Pacific Conference on Antennas and Propagation (APCAP)