38 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO.

1, JANUARY 2014
A Novel Dual-Band Bandpass Filter
With Closely Spaced Passbands
Dong Chen, Lei Zhu, Fellow, IEEE, and Chonghu Cheng
AbstractThis letter proposes a double-slot-loaded resonator
for exploration of a novel dual-band bandpass lter with two
closely spaced passbands. A small ratio of dual-passband central
frequencies is realized by positioning the double slot stubs in
an offset way. The rst-passband fractional bandwidth can be
properly tuned by a distance between the two slots, while the
second one is determined by attaching a microstrip open-circuited
stub at center. After the principle of this initial lter is described,
a prototype lter is designed and fabricated. Measured results
satisfactorily validate the predicted ones of the proposed lter.
Index TermsBandpass lter (BPF), double-slot-loaded res-
onator (DSLR), dual-passband.
I. INTRODUCTION
I
N recent years, rapid progress in dual-band wireless com-
munications has been continuing to promote the design and
exploration of advanced dual-band bandpass lters (BPFs) with
specied functionalities. So far, a variety of dual-band BPFs has
been extensively studied using different design approaches. The
most straightforward method to implement a dual-band BPF is
to combine two individual BPFs with dissimilar passbands at the
common input/output ports [1]. However, these lters achieve
the desirable dual-passband performance at the expense of en-
larged overall circuit area.
To circumvent this problem, a stepped impedance resonator
(SIR) has been widely applied to realize dual-band BPFs by
making use of its rst two resonant modes [2][4]. But, these
resonant frequencies of the SIRs and coupling coefcients in
the two desired passbands are strongly dependent on each other.
Therefore, it is difcult to regulate the bandwidths of the two
passbands independently. The dual-band BPFs can also be real-
ized by using open/short stub loaded resonators [5][8]. Due to
their advantage in creating transmission zeros, these BPFs have
high-skirt ltering selectivity, but they usually require a com-
plex design procedure in addition to a large circuit area because
of their need in so many stubs. Recently, multi-mode dual-band
lters on ring resonators [9][11] have been attracting a lot of
attention because of their compactness in size. In [10], [11], two
pairs of the 1st- and 2nd-order degenerate modes of a ring res-
onator were properly excited to form two passbands by placing
Manuscript received January 31, 2013; revised May 29, 2013, July 31, 2013,
September 21, 2013; accepted October 15, 2013. Date of publication November
08, 2013; date of current version January 06, 2014. This work was supported by
the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant 61071020), the Natural
Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (BK2012433, BK20130872),
and MOE Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 (Reference RG 39/11), Sin-
gapore.
D. Chen and C. Cheng are with the School of Electronic Science and Engi-
neering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China.
L. Zhu was with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and now with the Faculty of
Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LMWC.2013.2288277
Fig. 1. Ideal transmission-line model of the proposed DSLR. (a) The DSLR.
(b) Variation in resonant modes. (c) Even-mode bisection without a stub. (c)
Odd-mode bisection without a stub. (d) Even-mode circuit with a stub.
two feeding points at the separation angle of 45 or 135 . How-
ever, the two passbands are far apart from each other and the
spacing between them is not easy for adjustment.
In this study, we propose a double-slot-loaded resonator
(DSLR), as shown in Fig. 1(a), for design of a novel dual-band
BPF with dual transmission poles in each band using its rst
four resonant modes. In design, the two offset-placed slot stubs
provide us with a degree of freedom to control the dual-pass-
band spacing and a transmission zero located between the two
passbands. The rst passband bandwidth can be tuned by a
distance between the two slots, while the controllability of the
second passband bandwidth can be achieved by installing a mi-
crostrip open-circuited stub at center, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a).
Plus, this open-circuited stub can generate a transmission zero
at high frequency, resulting to widen the upper stopband. After
the principle of the proposed resonator and lter is explained,
a prototype lter with dual-passband is designed and fabri-
cated. Measured results of the fabricated BPF are found in good
agreement with the predicted ones over a wide frequency range,
demonstrating good in-band performance and good isolation of
dual-passband as well as wide upper-stopband.
II. DUAL-BAND BANDPASS FILTER ON DSLR
Fig. 1(a) is the schematic of the proposed double-slot-loaded
resonator (DSLR). To simplify our design, the characteristic
impedance of the slotline is selected as the same as that
of the microstrip line, i.e., electrical length , which equals
1531-1309 2013 IEEE
CHEN et al.: A NOVEL DUAL-BAND BANDPASS FILTER WITH CLOSELY SPACED PASSBANDS 39
Fig. 2. Resonant-frequency chart of the proposed resonator or DSLR derived
under weak coupling at external ports. (a) Varied . (c) Varied
.
to 90 at 2 GHz. The and denote the offset length of
the slot and the distance between two of them, respectively.
When the double-slot is properly etched on the ground plane, the
two additional resonant modes can be produced at frequencies
lower than 1st and 2nd resonant modes of the microstrip uni-
form impedance resonator (UIR), as depicted by the dash line
and black solid line in Fig. 1(b). In this case, the second resonant
mode can only emerge as the two slot stubs are separated or the
distance, i.e., , is larger than 0 . Thus, it can be expected that
the rst and second pairs of resonant modes can be used to form
up the lower and upper passbands with dual transmission poles
at each, respectively.
Based on the even- and odd-mode approach, the symmetrical
plane in Fig. 1(a) becomes a perfect magnetic wall and electric
wall, respectively. and represent the input admittances
at two ports, looking into the left and right sides of the one-port
network with open- and short-circuited ends in the symmetrical
plane accordingly, as shown in Fig. 1(c) and (d). According to
the transverse resonance technique, we can derive
(1)
where you see (2), as shown at the bottom of the page, and
(3)
(4)
Fig. 3. Varied slot congurations (Dash line: straight slot stubs, Solid line:
folded slot stubs).
Fig. 2(a) plots the rst four resonant frequencies, namely,
, versus the ratio of under three ra-
tios of . The rst pair of resonant frequencies,
and , rise up synchronously as increases, while, the second
pair of resonant frequencies, and , vary in an opposite
direction, even though starts to go up as exceeds 0.7. This
trend allows us to construct a dual-band lter with controllable
spacing between the dual passbands of interest.
As can be seen in Fig. 2(a), compared to and
varies quickly with respect to , which makes it possible to con-
trol the bandwidth of the 1st passband independently.
In order to control the bandwidth of the 2nd passband ef-
fectively, a microstrip open-circuited stub with characteristic
impedance and electrical length is further introduced at
the center of the microstrip transmission line, as indicated in
Fig. 1(a). The corresponding even-mode bisection is sketched
in Fig. 1(e), while the odd-mode bisectiond is the same as that
in Fig. 1(c). Therefore, the existence of this microstrip-line stub
can only affect the even resonances. The can be rewritten as:
(5)
Fig. 2(b) shows the variation of the even-mode resonant
frequency with respect to the ratio of under three
impedance ratios of , while and are xed to be
0.5 and 0.7, respectively. The odd-mode resonant frequencies,
and , are also plotted in Fig. 2(b). With the increase of
slowly drops down to , while quickly decreases
closely to . In addition, moves quickly with as is
in the range of 0.1 to 0.7, while apparently has no inuence
on . As a consequence, the bandwidth of the 2nd passband
can be tuned by adjusting the width and length of the microstrip
stub.
In Fig. 1(b), a transmission zero located between the two
passbands can be observed when the sum of the input admit-
tances at the connection with microstrip transmission line,
looking into the above and below sides of the slot stubs, equals
to zero. Now, lets reshape the double slot stubs as the folded
(2)
40 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Fig. 4. Layout of nally-implemented prototype dual-band BPF (unit: mm).
Fig. 5. Dual-band BPF frequency responses. (Black solid line: measurement;
short dash line: EM simulation; gray solid line: equivalent circuit analysis.)
TABLE I
COMPARISON OF VARIOUS DUAL-BAND BANDPASS FILTERS
spiral structures, as shown in the inset of Fig. 3, to miniatur-
izethe overall size of the DSLR and to introduce an additional
weak coupling between two slot stubs. As illustrated in Fig. 3,
the two coupled folded-slots are placed in proximity to each
other, resulting to createcross inductive coupling between them.
As such, an additional transmission zeros is generated by
using the cross-coupling technique, which is found very useful
to improve the isolation between the two passbands.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Following the above discussion, the design steps can be
listed as follows: rstly, the ratio of the central frequencies
can be approximately determined by tuning the offset of the
slots based on the design graphs plotted in Fig. 2. Secondly, the
bandwidths of the two passbands can be tuned independently.
While, based on the lowpass prototype, the external quality
factor concerned with the I/O coupling can be determined by
the desired bandwidth. Finally, the parameters of the I/O cou-
pling structure can be designed by the desired external quality
factor. A dual-band BPF is designed and implemented on the
substrate, Rogers 6010, with a relative dielectric constant of
10.8, thickness of 0.635 mm. Fig. 4 shows the layout of the nal
prototype lter circuit. Fig. 5 depicts the results of simulation,
measurementand equivalent circuit analysisin the wide-band
frequency spectrum, respectively. From Fig. 5, we can see that
the lower and upper passbands have the fractional bandwidth
of 17.0% and 8.4%, centered at 2.1 and 2.6 GHz, respectively.
The ratio of the dual-passband central frequencies is about
1:1.3. Measured minimum insertion loss is 0.8 and 1.2 dB in
the rst and second passbands, respectively, while their respec-
tive return loss is better than 20.0 dB. Two transmission zeros
really appear between the two passbands, thus guaranteeing
high isolation. Plus, as can be seen in Fig. 4, both simulated
and measured results show a wide upper stopband in a range
from 2.8 to 5.8 GHz. It can be understood that the fth resonant
mode is effectively suppressed by the central stub. Moreover,
a table, namely, Table I, is tabulated as below to provide the
dual-passband performance of our proposed dual-band lter in
comparison to those published ones, and it can demonstrate the
advantage of our design, i.e., closely spaced dual-passbands.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a novel DSLRresonator is proposed and adopted
in the design of a dual-band BPF with closely spaced passbands.
In principle, these two closely spaced passbands are realized by
making use of the offset length of the slot stubs. Meanwhile,
the fractional bandwidths of these two passbands can be con-
trolled by a distance between the two slots and the installed mi-
crostrip open-circuited stub, respectively. By folding the two
slot stubs and placing them closely with each other, an addi-
tional transmission zero is generated between the two passbands
and it allows us to achieve excellent isolation between them.
The lowest harmonic passband can be suppressed by an addi-
tional zero brought by the microstrip open-circuited stub. Ex-
perimental results of the fabricated prototype lter are provided
to successfully verify the proposed method and validate the pre-
dicted results.
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