28

IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010

Wideband Bandpass Filter With

Recongurable Bandwidth
Alexander Miller, Student Member, IEEE, and Jia-Sheng Hong, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstractthis letter proposes a novel building block for developing tunable wideband bandpass lters. The proposed circuit
block mainly consists of short circuit coupled lines and short
circuit stubs with pin diodes as tuning elements. This work aims to
demonstrate recongurable bandwidth of this type of lter. Two
lters are designed and fabricated; one can be switched between
a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 16.3% and 35% at a center
frequency of 1.9 GHz, and the other can be switched from a FBW
of 27.8% to 37.4% at a center frequency of 1.9 GHz. The insertion
loss and return loss in the rst lter range from 4.17 dB to 0.4 dB
and 27.54 dB to 19.04 dB. The second lter exhibits an insertion
loss ranging from 0.73 dB to 0.43 dB and a return loss range from
31.1 dB to 27.7 dB. The tested lters show good agreement with
EM simulations.
Index TermsBandpass lter, microstrip lter, tunable lter.

I. INTRODUCTION
DVANCES in many microwave systems and applications
with multifunction capabilities means that there is an increasing demand to develop recongurable lters. Thus recongurable lters are essential for future wireless communication systems across commercial, defense and civil sectors. In all
these systems recongurable lter technologies hold the key to
controlling the spectrum of RF signals, eliminating interference
and preserving the dynamic range under any signal receiving
condition. Recongurable lters can be realised in a variety of
ways, but no matter what method of tuning is used they must
conserve their transmission and reection coefcient over the
tuning range specied. They offer many advantages over traditional lter banks, the main being size and exibility.
Many tunable lters have been investigated that control the
center frequency [1][6]. The tunability of the center frequency
is accomplished by varying the electrical lengths of lter resonators; tunability is either continuous or in discrete steps with
the use of varactors or pin diodes. Varactors were initially utilized and as the most popular choices being: Semiconducting
[1], BST [2] and piezoelectric [3]. Conversely, in order to tune
the center frequency in discrete steps pin diodes are employed
[5]; however with the introduction of microelectromechanical
systems switches, tuning the center frequency in discrete steps

Manuscript received August 03, 2009; revised October 09, 2009. First published December 09, 2009; current version published January 08, 2010. This
work was supported by in part by a UK EPSRC Industrial CASE Award.
Alexander Miller and Jia-Sheng Hong are with Department of Electrical,
Electronic and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, U.K. Email:
am541@hw.ac.uk, J.Hong@hw.ac.uk.
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LMWC.2009.2035958

has been gaining more popularity due to their low RF losses and
dc consumption [6].
In comparison to tunability of center frequency, there has
been very little effort made in tunability of bandwidth. A
reason for this is the lack of methods to vary the inter-resonator
coupling electronically that is essential for bandwidth control.
There have been some papers that tackle this subject in a variety
of ways, some concentrating on the tunability of bandwidth at
a xed center frequency [7], [8] and others dealing with simultaneous control of both bandwidth and center frequency [9],
[10]. On inspection of the literature it is clear that most reported
lter topologies and methods used only apply to narrowband
applications. However, there is increasing demand for tunable
wideband lters. Typical applications would be receiver modules and RF converters where lter banks can be replaced by
such a lter in order to save board space. This letter investigates
a new topology to realise such a lter with a recongurable
bandwidth. The tuning elements used are pin diodes, as they
are much less lossy than the varactor diodes, thus limiting the
degradation in passband width and lter operation.
II. FILTER BUILDING BLOCK
Shown in Fig. 1 is the proposed lter building block, which
mainly consists of short-circuited coupled lines and stubs that
have an electrical length of 90 at the center frequency of the
passband. The tunability of the proposed lter is based on the
concept that, for a given pair of coupled lines with xed evenand odd-mode impedance, altering the impedance of the stubs
alters the coupling and in turn alters the bandwidth, hence, by
switching the stubs in and out of the circuit alters the passband
width. It can be shown that the return loss in the passband only
depends on the pair of even- and odd- mode impedances and is
independent of the characteristic impedance of the other stubs
(see Fig. 2). This makes bandwidth tuning easy. In addition to
this advantage, by simply cascading several same lter blocks
of this type, a higher order lter that increases the selectivity
while theoretically maintaining the same return loss over the
same bandwidth can be built. This trait is very desirable whilst
designing wideband lters with a recongurable bandwidth (see
Fig. 3).
III. EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION
To validate the circuit concept described in the above section,
two recongurable lter building blocks were designed, simulated and tested.
A. EM Simulation
Fig. 4 shows an implemented recongurable microstrip lter
and
mm. The pin
on a substrate with
diodes were modeled by using a capacitor of value 0.025 pF for
isolation and a resistor of value of 4 for connection (both these

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MILLER AND HONG: WIDEBAND BANDPASS FILTER WITHRECONFIGURABLE BANDWIDTH

29

Fig. 1. Proposed Filter Building Block for Recongurable Bandwidth.

Fig. 4. Implemented lter with switchable stubs (narrowband stubs).

Fig. 2. Theoretical response showing change of bandwidth with change of

= 10

100
; 
= 
= 90 ,
impedance of stub (Z
Z = 110:4
; Z = 18:8
).

Fig. 5. Performance of Filter with Narrowband stubs.

Fig. 3. Theoretical lter response with two blocks cascaded (Z

6:7

0 70

= 4:5

0 85

Z = 110:4
; Z = 18:8
).

values are extracted from the data sheet for the PIN diode used).
For practical implementation, depending on a set of even- and
odd- mode impedances implemented, impedance transformers
may or may not be needed at the terminals for a matching purpose. The initial dimensions of the circuits were obtained using
Microwave Ofce [11] and nalized using EM software, Sonnet
[12]. The dimensions of the stubs are
mm
and
mm (narrowband stubs) while the coumm,
mm and
pled lines have a gap
mm. In this case, the impedance transformer
has a width and length of 0.6 mm and 24.8 mm, respectively.
In Fig. 4, just replacing the narrowband stubs with two wideband stubs
mm and
mm),
we obtain the second recongurable lter block. The simulated
performances of these two lters are summarized in Table I,
with the simulated and measured performance being illustrated
in Figs. 5 and 6.
There are some shifts in the center frequencies, which are accounted for by unequal even and odd mode electrical lengths and
some effect from the bias circuit. Furthermore, these unequal
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Fig. 6. Performance of Filter with Wideband stubs.

even and odd mode phase velocities also cause the spurious response at 4 GHz; the next spurious response should be at 6 GHz,
i.e., 3 . This is due to the fact that microstrip are not pure TEM
transmission lines. There is also a very slight degradation in the
bandwidth performance due to the bias lines being connected
in the middle of the coupled lines. The bias lines slightly decrease the coupling and, hence, decrease the bandwidth of the
response.
In the on state of the narrowband stub conguration there
is more losses associated with the response; this is due to the
isolation scheme used in order to suppress any unwanted spikes
in the passband due to fringing. By placing the diode half way
up the stub means there is a bigger current at this point, hence,
more losses are involved. By simply using one diode for isolation a spike was seen near the passband which would be detrimental to lter operation. Many cases were tried the rst being
that a diode at the bottom of the stub and one at the top. This

30

IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010

TABLE I
PERFORMANCE OF THE FILTERS

of short-circuited coupled lines and the coupling between the

two lines is controlled by switching short circuit stubs in and out
the circuit. The demonstrated lters show good agreement between measured and simulated results with recongurable bandwidths ranging from 16% to 37%. This topology also offers a
good precursor to a lter with the potential to simultaneously
control the bandwidth and center frequency, which is subject to
investigation.
Fig. 7. Fabricated recongurable lter blocks; (a) with narrowband Stubs,
(b) with wideband stubs.

means that any spike occurring would occur at 2 fo. However,

this introduced far too much losses due to the current being at a
maximum value at the via hole. It was found that by moving the
position of the diode further down the stub reduced the losses but
brought the unwanted spike closer to the passband, hence, the
diode was moved half way down with a compromise between
losses and isolation of the spike being made. There are much
less losses associated with the wideband stubs as less fringing
occurs due to the line being much more narrow. Also by being a
high impedance line less, the maximum current is less than the
narrowband stub. The noise gure of the lter may be considered equal to its insertion loss since the PIN diodes are basically
a resistive element.
B. Fabricated Results
The lters were fabricated using a Rogers Duroid 3003 substrate in compliance with the design; Fig. 7 illustrates the fabricated lters with bias lines to apply bias voltages to the circuit
having MACOM PIN diodes (MA4AGSBP907) implemented.
The circuits were measured using a Hewlett Packard 8510B
network analyzer. Figs. 5 and 6 show the measured responses.
Table I summarizes the measured performance. The fabricated
lters show good agreement with the simulations. The small discrepancies in the insertion losses, the center frequency o and
3-dB fractional bandwidth FBW are attributed to the tolerances
of components and fabrication process.
IV. CONCLUSION
This letter proposes a novel building block for developing recongurable wideband lters. The proposed structure uses a pair
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V. ACKOWLEGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank A. Burdis and C. Bird at
SELEX Sensors & Airborne Systems Ltd. for their support and
encouragement.
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