OPEN AND SHORT U-SHAPED

MICROSTRIP RESONATORS FOR

SECOND-ORDER SINGLE- OR
DUAL-BANDSTOP FILTER DESIGN
Yu Luo1,2 and Jens Bornemann 1
1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of
Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada; Corresponding author:
[email protected]
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National
University of Singapore, 117583, Singapore

Received 30 October 2016

Figure 1 An open U-shaped resonator coupled to a microstrip line.

ABSTRACT: Single- and dual-band bandstop filters with U-shaped [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
resonators are proposed. First, short and open U-shaped resonators are
coupled to a main transmission line to obtain second-order stopband
performance with two transmission zeros in the stop band and two passband. A BSF centered at 3.5 GHz loaded with an open and
reflection zeros in the passband. In contrast to traditional second-order a shorted resonator is designed. The filter has two transmission
bandstop filters, the two different resonators are coupled to both sides zeros in the stopband and one reflection zero in each of the
of the microstrip line so that the commonly used quarter wavelength upper or lower passbands. Since the resonators are coupled to
distance between resonators is eliminated. Secondly, open and short both sides of the main microstrip line, compact size is obtained.
U-shaped stepped impedance resonators are employed to obtain dual- For dual-band applications, a BSF centered at 3.5 and 5.5 GHz
band bandstop filters in a compact size. Both filters are prototyped and with U-shaped stepped impedance resonators is proposed. For
measured. Good agreement between simulated and measured results each stopband, there are two transmission zeros in the stopband
demonstrates the reliability of the design method. VC 2017 Wiley
and two reflection zeros in the upper and lower passbands. To
Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:1362–1365, 2017;
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/
validate the proposed method, both filters are implemented.
mop.30544 Good agreement between simulated and measured results con-
firms the proposed method.
Key words: bandstop filters; dual-band filters; U-shaped resonator;
microstrip line
2. SINGLE BAND BSF
A microstrip line loaded with an open U-shaped resonator is
1. INTRODUCTION
shown in Figure 1. The total length of the resonator is kg/2,
Bandstop filters (BSFs) play an important role in receiver front where kg is the guided wavelength at the center frequency. The
ends of modern wireless communication systems. Therefore, length of the coupled line is set as L1, and its effect on
many different configurations in printed-circuit technology have S-parameters is shown in Figure 2. Because of the magnetic
been proposed [1–12]. One method to realize a BSF is to coupling between the main transmission line and the resonator,
employ defected ground structures [1,2] because of their charac- a reflection zero in the lower passband is created, and with
teristics to disturb the current distribution in the ground plane.
increasing L1, the magnetic coupling becomes stronger and the
Unfortunately, the structures are a little complex. The second
frequency of the reflection zero decreases.
method is to use open stepped impedance stubs [3–5] or
A transmission line loaded with a shorted U-shaped resonator
coupled-line stubs [6] tapped at a main transmission line. How-
is shown in Figure 3. The length of the coupled line is set as L2
ever, the distance between the stubs must be a quarter-
and its effect on S-parameters is shown in Figure 4. Because of
wavelength which increases component size.
the electric coupling between the main transmission line and the
The third typical way to design dual-mode BSFs is to place
resonators in parallel with main transmission lines [7–11].
L-shaped [7–9], T-shaped [9], E-shaped [10], and horizontal
U-shaped [11] resonators are employed to achieve stopband per-
formance. At the resonant frequencies, the resonators are in reso-
nance and equivalent to short circuits. At other frequencies, they
have very little loading effect on the main transmission line. But
in these designs, the distances between resonators are selected as
quarter-wavelengths, which is not convenient to reduce the size
of filters. Two Hilbert-fork resonators are placed in parallel with
the main transmission line to obtain a tri-band BSF [12]. Howev-
er, the minimum return loss in the lower passband, close to the
first stopband, is only 5 dB because the distance between the two
Hilbert-fork resonators is less than a quarter-wavelength.
In this article, BSFs with U-shaped resonators are proposed.
First, the performances of a transmission line loaded with open
or short U-shaped resonators are investigated. The analytic
investigation shows that the open U-shaped resonator can
provide a reflection zero in the lower passband and the short
U-shaped resonator provides a reflection zero in the upper Figure 2 Effect of L1 on S-parameters

1362 MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 59, No. 6, June 2017 DOI 10.1002/mop
Figure 3 A shorted U-shaped resonator coupled to a microstrip line.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Figure 6 Top- and bottom-view photographs of the fabricated single-

band filter. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

resonator, a reflection zero in the upper passband is obtained.

Similar to the open U-shaped resonator, increasing L2 leads to a
stronger electric coupling and a decreasing location of the
reflection zero.
Based on the above discussion, a filter with an open and a
short U-shaped resonator is proposed and its dimensions are
shown in Figure 5. The open resonator provides a reflection
zero in the lower passband and a transmission zero in the stop-
band; the short resonator provides a reflection zero in the upper
passband and a transmission zero in the stopband. Top and
bottom views of the prototyped filter are depicted in Figure 6.
A Thru-Reflect-Line (TRL) calibration kit is used to de-embed
the effects of transitions to coaxial ports. Figure 7 shows the
comparison between simulated and measured results. Good
Figure 4 Effect of L2 on S-parameters agreement is observed. The locations of the simulated transmis-
sion zeros and reflection zeros are well reproduced in the meas-
urements. The measured stopband attenuation is better than 13
dB, and the return loss in the lower passband is better than 23
dB while that in the upper passband is better than 20 dB.

Figure 5 Dimensions of the single-band bandstop filter. [Color figure Figure 7 Simulated and measured S-parameters of the filter in
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Figure 5. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

DOI 10.1002/mop MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 59, No. 6, June 2017 1363
 Figure 10 Simulated and measured S-parameter of the filter in Figure
8. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

The rejection levels in the stopbands are 20 and 15 dB, and the
Figure 8 Dimensions of the dual-band bandstop filter. [Color figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] transmission levels in the passbands are 20, 13, and 10 dB,
respectively.
3. DUAL-BAND BSF
4. CONCLUSION
U-shaped stepped impedance resonators are employed to obtain
The two novel BSFs using open and short U-shaped resonators
a dual-band BSF with center frequencies at 3.5 and 5.5 GHz.
The dimensions of the filter are shown in Figure 8. The frequen- are attractive solutions for compact filter designs. The design
cies of both stopbands can be controlled by the size of the reso- methodology is described and the proposed BSFs have been
nators. There is magnetic coupling between the open resonator implemented. Both filters demonstrate good selectivity and com-
at the first stopband and electric coupling at the second stop- pact size because of the two different couplings on both sides of
band. Therefore, the open resonator provides a reflection zero in the microstrip line. The measured results show good agreement
the lower passband of the first stopband and another reflection with simulations, thus verifying the proposed design approach.
zero in the upper passband of the second stopband. Similarly,
the short resonator provides a reflection zero in the upper pass- ACKNOWLEDGMENT
band of the first stopband because of the electric coupling and a This work was supported by the TELUS Research Grant in
reflection zero in the lower passband of the second stopband Wireless Communications.
because of electric coupling. Top and bottom views of the pro-
totyped dual-BSF are depicted in Figure 9. Simulated and mea- REFERENCES
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 European Microwave Conference, Nuremberg, Germany, October 1. INTRODUCTION
2013, pp. 25–28. Nowadays, reconfigurable antennas (RAs) have gained consider-
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resonator,” In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on and the cost of radio system. A great many studies have been
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Tel Aviv, Israel, November 2009, pp. 1–6. uration, such as dual band varactor-loaded slot patch antenna
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filters based on dual-band combline structures,” IEEE Trans Micro- the others [4–8]. The electric reconfiguration needs extra com-
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RA. Compared with electric reconfiguration, field reconfigura-
tion scheme is based on the tunable feature of the materials
parameters under bias electric or magnetic fields. This scheme
C 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
V
does not need extra circuit as electric tuning and then eases the
antenna design. Generally, magnetic materials have stronger
REALIZING FREQUENCY responses to the bias magnetic field than the responses of
RECONFIGURABLE ANTENNA BY dielectric to the bias electric field at low field strength. There-
FERRITE-LOADED HALF-MODE SIW fore, magnetic field reconfiguration is promising.
Magnetic field RAs (MRAs) can be realized by loading mag-
Qun Lou, Rui-xin Wu, Fan-guang Meng, and Yin Poo netic material into the conventional antennas and work under an
School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University,
external magnetic bias field. In Refs. [9] and [10], ferrite layers
Nanjing, Jiangsu, China; Corresponding author: [email protected]
are embedded in the substrate of patch or helical antennas,
respectively, and both of them achieve 10% of tunable frequen-
Received 3 November 2016
cy range. Because of the features of light weight, low profile,
high Q factor, and easiness to integrate with other circuits, sub-
ABSTRACT: We propose and experimentally demonstrate a frequency strate integrated waveguide (SIW) has been used in RA designs,
reconfigurable antenna using ferrite loaded half-mode substrate inte-
for example, SIW-RA using varactors has a tunable frequency
grated waveguide (SIW). The antenna design is based on a SIW cavity
with an embedded ferrite slab, which causes the resonant frequency of
range from 4.13 to 4.50 GHz [11]. Recently, MRAs realized by
the cavity tunable under bias magnetic field. The antenna features omni- ferrite-loaded SIW antennas were reported [12–14]. However,
direction radiation and small size. A prototype antenna is designed and there are some shortcomings in practical applications. For exam-
fabricated. The measurements show the tunable frequency bandwidth is ple, the SIW-based MRAs have a relatively large size which
over 11% covering frequencies 5.04–5.62 GHz in low bias magnetic needs to be miniaturized, and bias magnetic field tuning by
field region, and 5% covering 4.28–4.5 GHz in high bias magnetic field mechanical way is neither precise nor convenient in practical
region. The measurement is in good agreement with simulations. The applications. Half mode substrate integrated waveguide
gain of antenna is all over 1.6 dBi, and the frequency reconfiguration (HMSIW) reduces half volume of the substrate integrated wave-
does not affect the radiation pattern of the antenna, providing a prefera-
guide, therefore, effectively miniaturize the size of SIW-based
ble feature for frequency reconfigurable antenna. This type of antenna
may be a good candidate for practical applications such as base stations
RA. Very recently, HMSIW-based RAs were proposed both by
and satellites. V
C 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol electric reconfiguration [15] and magnetic reconfiguration [16].
Lett 59:1365–1371, 2017; View this article online at In this work, based on the half mode substrate integrated
wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.30549 waveguide (HMSIW) cavity, we proposed and designed frequen-
cy tunable HMSIW antenna. The designed antenna features
Key words: SIW antenna; magnetic reconfigurable; ferrite loaded; half small size, which is only half volume of associated SIW anten-
mode SIW; cavity backup antenna na, and has decent total bandwidth over 16%. When bias

Figure 1 (a) Cavity with ferrite slab, (b) effective relative permeability, and (c) resonant frequency and effective permeability at different magnetic
bias. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

DOI 10.1002/mop MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 59, No. 6, June 2017 1365