DESIGN OF A MICROWAVE

CHANNELIZED ACTIVE FILTER FOR MMIC

Eric Thibodeau
Ph.D. Student,
Universite de Sherbrooke
e-mail: eric.thibodeau@usherbrooke.ca
Jacques Beauvais
Professor,
Universite de Sherbrooke
e-mail: jacques.beauvais@usherbrooke.ca

Abstract
The emergence of new wireless communication systems is always increasing the need for smaller, lighter and cheaper components while
technical issues are harder to address as higher frequencies are used.
We present the design of a fully integrated microwave bandpass filter,
using only lumped components and HEMTs, to fulfill the input requirements of a LMDS client. The channelized filter approach has been
used, since it has been demonstrated that this approach can achieve
high selectivity in high frequency bands. A three branches design is
used. All branches must be optimized so that their individual responses are added in the bandpass while they interfere outside to result in a very selective behavior. Each branch comprises two identical
amplifiers and a third order Butterworth filter properly optimized.
Final design simulations show that the filter is very selective with a
400 MHz bandpass bandwidth centered at 28.1 GHz. The bandpass
gain is slightly over 4 dB and the rejection over 80 dB. The resulting circuit would cover an area of about 10 mm2 . Further study
shows that the circuit is somewhat sensitive to component tolerances.
However, the sensitivity is associated with the lumped filters components used in each branch and not with the amplifiers characteristics. Consequently, manufacturing yield should not be substantially
less than the yield of the HEMT process itself.

Keywords Microwave active filter ; transversal filters ;

MMIC.

Introduction

Good things come in small packages. This old proverb

seems to be the way to do these days when designing new
communications devices. The industry is always asking for
smaller, lighter and cheaper components. As new systems
are designed, higher frequencies are also used. Traditionally,
microwave system designs have depended on passive filters.
These ones are often bulky and a trade off between size,
weight and performance has to be done. One way to overcome this trade off is to use active filters. The simplest form
of active filter is made of one filtering block cascaded with
one gain block. This type of design may efficiently compensate for losses but its selectivity is clearly not optimal.
Since then, several approaches of transversal filters have
been introduced [1][2]. From the transversal principles were
derived the channelized active filters, with which high compactness and selectivity can be achieved [3][4]. This kind of
active filter is very convenient in the cases where weight,
or space, are critical issues. MMICs (Monolithic Microwave
Integrated Circuits) could be used in their design as this
type of circuit is smaller and lighter, and have a lower cost

Francois Boone
Professor,
Universite de Sherbrooke
e-mail: francois.boone@usherbrooke.ca
Alain C. Houle
Professor,
Universite de Sherbrooke
e-mail: alain.houle@usherbrooke.ca
when produced in large quantities [5].
In this paper, we present a design study for the full integration of a microwave channelized active filter on a MMIC.
This integration must make use only of lumped components and HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors).
The goal for the circuit is to fulfill the input requirements
of a LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service) client.
First, we will detail the principles used in microwave
channelized active filters. In second place, we will present
the design choices made for our circuit. Finally, we will discuss the simulation results of our design.

2 Principles of channelized active filters

2.1 Transversal filters
The first developments on microwave active filters occurred in the mid-80s when the transversal and recursive
approaches were proposed [1]. Inspired from digital signal
processing, these filters were integrating delay lines and amplifiers, as shown in figure 1. The transfer function of this
transversal filter may be written as :
HT (j) =

M
X

m ej2m/s

(1)

m=0

Filtering, in this design, relies on phase differences bet-

Figure 1: Transversal filter

ween different paths in the circuit. Further research on the

transversal filter led to the use of simple order lumped filter elements instead of delay lines [2]. While they provide
the necessary delays, they also contribute to the amplitude
response. The global response of this type of filter may be
expressed :
H(j) = HS (j) HT (j)

(2)
Figure 3: Three-branch channelized filter

where HS (j) represents the complementary response

generated by the lumped filter delay elements.

2.2

Channelized filters

The researchs on transversal filters soon led to a new

family of microwave active filters [3]. The microwave channelized filter may be seen as a generalization of the design
presented in the previous section. In this type of design,
shown in figure 2, the input signal is divided between a
number of channels having a different individual response.
The main output is a combination of the transformed signal of each channel. These are designed in a way that the
signals from each branch interfere destructively with each
other for frequencies outside the desired bandpass, and are
adding for bandpass frequencies. Thus, the transfer function of this filter may be seen as :
H() =

N
X

An ()

(3)

n=0

Conventional approach to a channelized bandpass filter

design requires three channels : a main signal path and
two channels optimized to interfere with the main signal
path to obtain a more selective response. Some researchs
showed that it is also possible to obtain a very selective
bandpass response with only two channels [4]. However, to
achieve this, the two paths must be optimized to obtain
a 360 rotation of relative signal phase between the two
responses, which involves much more tuning.

Design of the channelized active filter

Our design uses a conventional approach of three channels, as seen in figure 3. Each branch is made of two ampli-

fiers and a bandpass filter. The main path is also including

a phase vernier, used to provide the phase opposition needed to improve the selectivity. It may also be used to the
fine tuning of the filter. All six amplifiers used in the design
are identical ; only the three bandpass filters are optimized
to obtain the desired behaviour. We followed three steps
to design the circuit : theoric optimization of the channels,
design of an amplifier and design of the bandpass filters for
each branch.

3.1

Theoric channel optimization

As mentionned before, the desired circuit must fulfill the

input requirements of a LMDS client. It must have a 400
MHz bandwidth centered at 28.1 GHz. The stopband rejection must be below -60 dB from the bandpass gain level.
To fulfill these requirements, the first step was to model the
filter with ideal blocks as illustrated in figure 3. Using ideal
amplifiers with constant gain, it is possible to adjust the
three bandpass filters used in each branch and the phase
vernier to obtain a combined response as desired. After seR
veral computer simulations using Agilent ADS
, third order Butterworth filters were selected with the characteristics shown in table I. In those simulations, the phase vernier
was a delay line of /2 for the center frequency of 28.1 GHz.

3.2

Amplifier design

The next design task was to provide the typical amplifier block to be used in the filter. It was obtained using
microwave amplifier design techniques [6]. It is composed
of an HEMT, which is very responsive to high frequencies.
The critical factor to keep in mind is to design input and
output impedance matching stages to offer a constant response over a sufficient bandwidth. The amplifier gain must
be constant over the desired bandpass response and over
a reasonable part of the stopband to help the optimization of interference between the signals to obtain a steep

lower channel
center channel
upper channel

fc (GHz)
27.975
28.100
28.225

fc (MHz)
100
150
100

TABLE I
Ideal characteristics of third order Butterworth filters
Figure 2: Channelized filter

transition band. The wideband impedance matching stages

R
were obtained using Agilent E-Syn
. The resulting amplifier have a gain of 8 dB, almost constant over a range
between 26.1 GHz and 30.1 GHz

3.3

Bandpass filters design

The final step was to design the lumped bandpass filters with the characteristics defined in table I and integrate
them with the amplifier designed previously. This may seem
pretty straightforward, but a little more optimization of the
filters used in each branch was necessary to obtain a satisfying result as the introduction of real amplifiers in the
design introduces some distortion. The bandwidth of the
upper channel was enlarged to 115 MHz. Final characteristics for the third order Butterworth filters are shown in
table II.

Simulation results

After the design was completed, we studied its performance and examined the possibility to build a prototype in
our laboratories. In the next sections, we present the filter
response, an approximation of its size and a study about
its sensitivity to lumped component tolerances.

4.1

Filter response

The first part of the analysis was to study the filter response itself. The computer simulation showed that the circuit composed only of lumped components and HEMTs
had a response similar to the initial design composed of
ideal blocks, as seen in figure 4. Bandpass gain is around
4 dB, which is lower than expected. This is explained by
the amplifier design ; while our initial design was based on
an amplifier block with a 10 dB gain, such gain was not
possible with the transistor used.
Another difference can be noticed about the stopband
rejection. While transmission zeros may be less noticeable,
global rejection is below -80 dB from bandpass gain at all
times, which is better than the goal of -60 dB we wanted
to achieve.

Figure 4: Simulation response of the channelized filter

4.2

Filter size

Another part of the study was to evaluate the actual area

needed to build the filter with MMIC techniques. Total area
would cover about 10 mm2 . This is very large and may
cause problems in the building of a prototype. To address
this, since the circuit is composed of normalized impendance blocks, it would be possible to divide the circuit in
separate pieces for the MMIC process. Final circuit could
be realized with three devices, one for each channel of the
filter.

4.3

Sensitivity to lumped component tolerances

Finally, we also studied the effect of the tolerances of each

lumped component on the production yield of the filter. To
achieve this, we used Monte Carlo simulations where the
lumped components had a value set randomly within a tolerance pattern. The filter responses were matched with a
template to calculate the percentage of working circuits.
Figure 5 shows that the production yield for the circuit
would be of 38% if the building techniques used guarantee
a lumped component tolerance below 0.01%. At all times,
tolerance should not be more than 0.5% to get working cir-

Further study also showed that phase rotation over the

400 MHz bandwidth is about -420. However, this rotation
is almost linear, which may be an advantage over other
types of filters.

lower channel
center channel
upper channel

fc (GHz)
27.975
28.100
28.225

fc (MHz)
100
150
115

TABLE II
Final characteristics for Butterworth filters
Figure 5: Production yield vs. component tolerance

Figure 6: Yield study about individual blocks

context where production yield is an issue, a more conventional hybrid approach [3] would be appropriate.
The most critical step in designing a channelized active
filter is the matching of the individual channel responses.
We used iterative optimizations to obtain a circuit that fulfills our initial requirements. It would be interesting to use
more sophisticated optimization techniques in these design
steps. For example, genetic algorithms have already been
used in generation of microwave line segments [7] and could
easily be applied in the case of a channelized filter. Some
more focused algorithms, like Tabou [8], may also be applied in future works. These type of tools may speed up
some of the design steps for microwave channelized active
filters.

Acknowledgments

cuits in production.
Further study about the sensitivity to lumped component
tolerances shows that the main reason circuits are rejected
as non-working is that they dont meet bandpass specifications of the template. The effect of the component tolerances is clearly causing bandpass deterioration. Rejection
bands are little or not affected by higher component tolerances.
We also investigated which blocks in the filter are more
sensitive to component tolerance. We repeated the same
type of Monte Carlo simulations, but only on individual
blocks this time. Figure 6 shows the effect of lumped component tolerances on production yield of individual parts
from the channelized filter. The effect is much less harmful
for the amplifiers as their production yield is still over 50%
for a lumped component tolerance of 1%. Thus, it can be
assumed that sensitivity to component tolerances is only
critical in the lumped filters used in each branch.

Conclusions

In this paper, we discussed the design of a fully integrated

three-branch microwave channelized active filter for MMIC.
Simulations of our design reveal a bandpass response with
400 MHz bandwidth centered at 28.1 GHz with a 4 dB gain,
a steep transition and a rejection over 80 dB. Filter would
be realizable and would cover a total area of 10 mm2 . The
device could easily be split into three circuits, one for each
channel of the filters.
The main concern about the final circuit is its sensitivity to lumped component tolerances. Imperfections in the
nominal characteristics of the components would be deteriorating its bandpass response. No effect has been noticed about the rejection band. Sensitivity is also associated
to the third-order Butterworth filters used in each branch.
The effect on the amplifiers is much less harmful. Low yield
should not be an obstacle to production in the cases where
size or weight of the circuit must be limited. However, in a

Thanks to the FQRNT for their financial support in this

research project, and a special thank to all the GMS team
at the Universite de Sherbrooke for their support in this
project.

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