An effective technique to design compact low pass filter has been proposed in this paper. The proposed method is highly effective for L-band applications. Low impedance microstrip lines are arranged such that they work as open stubs to increase the selectivity of the filter. Using the proposed technique about 57% size reduction has been realized with sharper roll off characteristics. An empirical expression is derived to determine the dimension of resonators. For cut-off frequency of 1.7 GHz the investigated method has been fabricated and tested. There is a close agreement be-tween simulated and measured results
The compact size and suppression of unwanted frequency components with excellent passband characteristic is the major concern of the microwave low pass filters design. To achieve the compact size printedcircuit technology is generally preferred to design the planar microwave filters. This technique also provides easy fabrication, low cost as well as easy integration with other microwave circuits. Conventional design of microstrip low pass filters basically involves either use of shunt stubs or using the stepped impedance network that is high-low impedance transmission line [1-2]. Using the above methods, a large number of inductive and capacitive elements are required to achieve shaper roll-off characteristic thus the resultant filters occupy larger area. There are several methods to reduce the size of microstrip low pass filters which have been reported [3-9]. One of the effective methods of size reduction is to introduce slow wave structure either in the main line [4-5] or on the ground plane [6-9]. In [
In this paper, a compact microstrip low pass filter has been proposed with sharper roll-off characteristics. An empirical expression has been derived to provide the direct calculation of the lengths of the resonators. The basic concept used for the proposed technique has also been discussed critically. The designed filter has been fabricated and tested.
To design passive low pass prototype filter, amplitudesquared transfer function may be used [
where L and C are the inductances and capacitances of the resonators. Z0 is the source and load impedances, fc is the cut-off frequency in hertz. The electrical lengths for the inductors and capacitors for microstrip structure are proportional to the respective inductances and capacitances [
for inductor
for capacitor where β is the phase constants, l is physical lengths of resonators, Zhigh and Zlow are the impedance of inductive and capacitive lines respectively.
The constant g0 and g6 shown in
To calculate the lengths of the resonators for the proposed method, the value of f(x) is determined for desired cut-off frequency x (in GHz) using Equation (3) which is a polynomial of the fourth order that has been empirically derived. This equation has been derived by using curve fitting of simulated results for different cut off frequencies. From the Equations (4) and (5) it is clear that the lengths of inductive components are inversely proportional to the corresponding impedance, whereas the lengths of capacitive elements are proportional to the corresponding impedances. Since as the cut-off frequency decreases the length of the resonators increases. This makes the length of resonators for L-band application so large. The value of f(x) has been used to calculate the lengths of inductive and capacitive lines by using the Equations (4) and (5) respectively. The layout of the filter is shown in
network in which the high impedance lines are placed at one end of the low impedance stubs. It has been studied that as the position of high impedance line shifted towards the end from the central position the values of overall capacitance increases and hence the cut-off frequency reduces.
where and are the physical lengths and and effective dielectric constant of inductive (smaller width) and capacitive lines (wider width).
For the proposed design, a fifth order Chebyshev response for 0.1 dB ripple has been considered. The cut off frequency is considered as 1.7 GHz. The presented filter has been fabricated using the substrate FR4 with dielectric constant 4.5 and height 1.5 mm. By using the design equations given in the previous section the lengths of the inductive and capacitive line sections have been calculated for the frequency x = 1.7 GHz. The dimensions are calculated as length of low impedance resonators L1 = 1.41 mm, length of central stub is L3 = 2.44 mm, lengths of the inductive lines are L2 = 2.64 mm width of inductive lines are W2 = 0.1 mm and width of the capacitive lines are W3 = 20 mm and the width of the 50 ohm line is W1 = 2.81 mm. The designed structure is simulated using MoM based full wave electromagnetic simulation software IE3D [
insertion loss reaches more than 25 dB at about 2.2 GHz.
In this work a simple design method has been proposed to design a compact low pass filter. The size of the proposed design occupies 2.34 times lesser area than the conventionally designed low pass filters. That is using the proposed technique about 57% size reduction has been realized. This filter shows more than 22 dB insertion loss within 0.5 GHz.