with antenna to construct a band-select antenna.
The comparison
between the bandwidths of the original and the band-select printed
F antenna system is shown in Figure 10. At the high band path of
the band-select printed F antenna, the impedance matching be-
tween the high band input and the antenna input is significantly
improved. Comparing with the original bandwidth of 5.45–5.8
GHz, and the bandwidth of the band-select antenna is found more
than doubled, 5.15– 6.19 GHz.
This impedance matching effect is further validated by the
measurement of the filter insertion losses of each path with the
renormalization of antenna input impedance. At low band, the
renormalized insertion loss is less than 1 dB, which is in-line with
the measurement in Figure 11. The insertion loss at the band-edge
of the impedance bandwidth is found 1.67 dB, slightly higher than
the 0.9 –1.0 dB at the mid-band frequency. The 1.67 dB insertion
loss is from 0.46 dB of mismatch loss and 1.21 dB from filter
attenuation. Comparing with the 3– 4 dB mismatch loss at these
frequencies of the original antenna, the impedance transformation
effect of the filter is proven.
The diplexer is also implemented with the printed dipole an-
tenna. Because the printed dipole antenna was designed for wide
impedance bandwidth, the effects of the impedance transformation
were not found significant as shown in Figure 12. The main
advantage of this design is that it completely covers the required
bandwidth of 2.4 –2.5 GHz and 4.9 –5.85 GHz for 802.11 a/b/g
wireless LAN applications. The renormalized insertion loss of the
new design is shown in Figure 13.
5. CONCLUSION
In this article, novel band-select antenna systems are presented.
Both can not only simplify the dual band WLAN front-end design
into a novel topology for portable device application, but also
provide better impedance matching between the front-end circuit
and antenna. In addition, the proposed design can also perform
impedance transformation, which significantly increases the radi-
ation efficiency. All these features provide the easiest integration
of dual-band WLAN radio into modern portable devices.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Authors would like to thank Rogers Corporation for providing the
substrate material.
REFERENCES
1. C.P. Huang, W. Vaillancourt, A. Parolin, and C. Zelley, Low power
consumption 2.4 GHz WLAN front-end module for a multiple radio
handset, In 2005 IEEE RFIC Symposium Digest of Papers, Long Beach,
USA, June 12–14, 2005.
2. K.L. Wong, Planar antennas for wireless communications, Wiley, New
York, 2003.
3. Agilent Technologies, Momentum RF, version 2005A.
© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
1872 MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 49, No. 8, August 2007
A PLANAR BANDPASS FILTER USING
BUTTERFLY RADIAL STUB
Ravi Kumar Joshi and A. R. Harish
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur, UP 208016, India
Received 13 January 2007
ABSTRACT: A bandpass filter using a single-slotted butterfly radial
stub connected in shunt with a short-circuited section of a microstrip
transmission line is proposed. A two pole filter based on the proposed
structure has been designed, analyzed, and fabricated. A good agreement
between the measured and the simulated results is observed. © 2007 Wiley
Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 49: 1872–1875, 2007;
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).
DOI 10.1002/mop.22600
Key words: bandpass filters; microstrip filters; microwave filters; pas-
sive filters
1. INTRODUCTION
Bandpass filters are essential components in most of the micro-
wave communication systems. These are used to pass the desired
signals while suppressing the spurious frequencies. In these sys-
tems, the RF front-end requires low loss, compact, and light weight
filters to enhance the overall system performance. These filters can
be designed and fabricated in various forms using various types of
resonators. Planar filters in microstrip or similar form are partic-
ularly attractive because of their smaller size, ease of fabrication,
low cost, and light weight. The rapid growth of mobile and
wireless communication systems has led to an increasing demand
for such miniaturized filters since most of modern microwave
systems have a limited space.
Several planar filter designs satisfy the above requirements;
however, their out-of-band performance is often limited due to the
periodic nature of the resonator elements of the filter. For example,
a bandpass filter made of half wavelength long sections of trans-
mission lines has a second passband appearing approximately at
twice the fundamental frequency [1]. Cascading additional band-
stop filters is the most straightforward method to suppress the
harmonics. However, this would also increase the insertion loss in
the passband and the overall circuit size [2].
Various forms of planar microstrip bandpass filter using com-
pact resonators like stepped impedance resonator [3], hair pin
resonators [4], net type resonator [5], and open loop resonators,
etc., have been proposed to improve the out-of-band performance
as well as make the filter compact. Recently, a miniaturized ring
filter using four equally spaced butterfly radial stubs with local
ground defects was proposed [6]. The etched slots in the ground
plane, however, need extra fabrication efforts.
Generally, a radial stub and its variant, viz., butterfly radial stub,
have been used for bandstop applications such as a bias-T [7]. In this
paper, we present a miniaturized bandpass filter using resonators
formed by butterfly radial stubs. The attractive features of the pro-
posed design are simplicity in construction, wide band performance,
suppression of the second mode, and moderate suppression of spuri-
ous response up to 3.75 times the fundamental centre frequency.
2. PROPOSED RESONANT STRUCTURE
The shape of the proposed structure resembles a butterfly radial
stub. It is formed from a butterfly radial stub of radius R0 and
vertex angle ␣, which is connected to a transmission line of width
W and length L. The ends of the transmission line are shorted to the
DOI 10.1002/mop
ground using vias. A slot of width G is cut through the radial stub
as shown in Figure 1. The structure formed in this fashion is in fact
a pair of coupled resonators. Therefore, the fundamental mode of
this structure has two eigen values. If a filter is formed using such
a structure, the bandwidth and the centre frequency of the filter
depends on these eigen values. The centre frequency is very close
to the average of the two eigen values and the bandwidth of the
filter is nearly equal to the difference between them. Since the
eigen values depend on the structural parameters, a parametric
study would give us an insight into the capabilities of the structure
to construct a bandpass filter.
The proposed structure is analyzed using a commercial full
wave EM simulator (IE3D) [8] and the eigen values of the funda-
mental and higher order modes are computed for various values of
G, L, ␣, and R0. The coupling coefficient of the nth mode can be
written as [4]
f m2 ⫺ f 2e
K⫽ , (1)
f m2 ⫹ f 2e
where fm and fe are the two eigen frequencies of the nth mode
corresponding to the even and odd mode of excitations and f0 is the
average of the two eigen frequencies given by
f m ⫹ fe
f0 ⫽ . (2)
2 microstrip line L ⫽ 60 mm, and the width of the microstrip line
For this study, we consider a structure with nominal values of L ⫽
60 mm, G ⫽ 0.5 mm, ␣ ⫽ 60°, R0 ⫽ 25 mm, and W ⫽ 4.68 mm that
is printed on a 1.58-mm-thick dielectric substrate having dielectric
constant (␧r) of 2.2. We study the effect of changing one parameter at
a time, while keeping all others at their nominal values.
The effect of changing L, R0, G, and ␣ on the average of eigen
values of the first, second, and the third modes as well as the
coupling coefficient of the first mode are shown in Figures 2(a)–
2(d), respectively.
Figure 1 Layout of the proposed resonator using a slotted butterfly radial
stub
DOI 10.1002/mop MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 49, No. 8, August 2007
The average frequency of fundamental mode (f01 ) reduces by
very small amount with the increase in any of the four parameters.
The second mode frequency (f02 ) does not change with L and ␣
while it comes down substantially with increase in R0 and G as
shown in Figures 2(b) and 2(c). The third mode frequency (f03 )
does not vary with ␣, but decreases by a small amount for larger
values of R0 and G. Increasing L results in a substantial reduction
in the third mode frequency [Fig. 2(a)], which brings it closer to
the fundamental frequency and hence is undesirable. At L ⫽ 60
mm, the third mode frequency is more than 3.75 times that of
fundamental frequency. Though a reduction in L can be used to
increase the separation between the fundamental and the third
mode, this results in the reduction of the coupling coefficient of the
fundamental. The coupling coefficient can be increased by reduc-
ing the gap or the radius of the stub. Therefore, by appropriate
choice of L, R0, and G, it is possible to come up with a design that
gives the required bandwidth and maximizes the separation be-
tween the fundamental and the third mode frequencies. It may be
observed here that the vertex angle of the resonator does not affect
either the frequencies or the coupling coefficients significantly.
3. A TWO-POLE FILTER EXAMPLE
The proposed structure is used to construct a two-pole bandpass
filter. The dimensions of the resonator are: vertex angle ␣ ⫽ 60°,
radius R0 ⫽ 25 mm, slot width G ⫽ 0.5 mm, length of the
W ⫽ 4.68 mm. This structure is fabricated on a 1.58-mm-thick
substrate of size 50 mm ⫻58 mm having a dielectric constant ␧r ⫽
2.2 (Fig. 3). Two symmetrically located taps form the input and
output ports as shown in the figure. The positions of these taps
from the short circuited ends (T) are determined in such a way that
they provide sufficient external coupling so that the filter has a
mid-band match of ⫺20 dB. Taking the taps closer to the short
circuit ends, it is possible to decrease the external coupling. The
simulated input match for various tap positions is shown in Figure
4. It is observed that tap position T ⫽ 11 mm gives a mid-band
input match of ⫺20 dB. The simulated and the measured scattering
parameters of this structure over a small band of frequencies
around the fundamental mode are shown in Figure 5(a) and broad
band responses are shown in Figure 5(b). Using the narrow band
coupled resonator theory [1], a MATLAB code is written to
simulate the response of the filter, and is also shown in Figure 5(a).
A good match is observed between both the simulated and the
measured results.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
It is observed from Figure 5(a) that the simulated bandwidth and
center frequencies for the proposed filter (11.3% and 699.69 MHZ,
respectively) correlate well with the measured values (13.7% and
691.875 MHz, respectively). What is very interesting is that the
eigen values of the proposed structure show the presence of second
mode around 1.5 GHz and third mode around 3 GHz [Fig. 2(a)].
However, the filter response indicates the low values of the atten-
uation around the third mode, but has a considerably large atten-
uation in the region of the second mode. The transmission response
has no spurious resonances all the way up to about 3.75 times the
fundamental frequency. This property of the proposed structure
enhances its usefulness.
As an example to demonstrate compactness of the proposed
structure we can design a bandpass filter, for a center frequency of
1.55 GHz, on a 0.51-mm-thick substrate having dielectric constant
of 3.38. The overall structure would occupy an area of the order of
19 mm ⫻19 mm, which seems to be reasonably small.
1873
Figure 2 (a) Effect of varying L on the center frequency and coupling coefficient. (b) Effect of varying R0 on center frequency and coupling coefficient.
(c) Effect of varying gap G on center frequency and coupling coefficient. (d) Effect of varying vertex angle (␣) on center frequency and coupling coefficient

5. CONCLUSION fundamental transmission band, which is a desirable feature. A

A simple bandpass filter using a slotted butterfly radial stub as a
coupled resonator is presented. The measured in-band and out-of-
band performance of the proposed filter are in good agreement
with the simulated results. The frequency of the spurious trans-
mission band is 3.75 times higher than the center frequency of the
parametric analysis of the proposed structure indicates that it is
possible to control its electrical performance by suitably choosing
various dimensions of the structure.

Figure 4 Effect of tap position on input match for the proposed bandpass
Figure 3 Photograph of the fabricated structure filter with nominal values of the structure

1874 MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 49, No. 8, August 2007 DOI 10.1002/mop
 PLANAR SLOT-ARRAY ANTENNA FED
BY AN OVERSIZED QUASI-TEM
WAVEGUIDE
A. Valero-Nogueira, E. Alfonso, J.I. Herranz, and M. Baquero
Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications Institute,
Polytechnic University of Valencia, c/ Cami de Vera, s/n Edificio 8G
(Acceso D, ITEAM), 46022 Valencia, Spain

Received 19 January 2007

ABSTRACT: We propose a novel planar slot-array antenna fed by a

new guiding structure which forces a quasi-TEM mode within an over-
sized rectangular waveguide. To achieve a quasi-TEM mode throughout
the waveguide a hard surface is placed on the bottom surface of the
waveguide while the radiating slots are at the upper face. The
waveguide is able to propagate invariant linear phase-fronts along
the axial direction which makes it attractive for steerable array an-
tennas. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett
49: 1875–1877, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.
interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.22586

Key words: slot-array antennas; oversized rectangular waveguides;

quasi-TEM waveguides; hard surfaces

1. INTRODUCTION
Single-layer oversized-rectangular waveguide slot-array antennas
have been investigated in the past years as attractive radiating
structures for low-cost high-gain mass applications [1], especially
in the millimetre-wave band, where only waveguides can assure
high efficiency rates. Several attempts have been made to obtain a
uniform quasi-TEM mode within such wide waveguides, the most
recent one being [2], where hard surfaces [3] are used on the
sidewalls of the waveguide with that purpose.
Oversized rectangular waveguides can support a multiplicity of
modes. Although a quasi-TEM mode can be generated by a com-
bination of TE modes, it is very difficult to preserve a uniform field
Figure 5 (a) Simulated and measured scattering parameters of the pro- pattern along the propagation axis. Furthermore, the inherent dis-
posed bandpass filter. (b) Simulated and measured scattering parameters of persive behavior of the modes makes this quasi-TEM propagation
the proposed bandpass filter showing out-of-band performance
very narrowband. Conversely, the quasi-TEM mode can also be
obtained by suppressing any kind of propagation except the TEM-
like one. This is the approach followed in this article. As it is well
REFERENCES known, each mode in a waveguide can be seen as the result of the
interference between two plane-waves impinging and reflecting
1. D.M. Pozar, Microwave engineering, 2nd ed., Wiley, New York, 1998.
successively from both sidewalls with a particular angle of inci-
2. W.-H. Tu and K. Chang, Compact second harmonic-suppressed band-
stop and bandpass filters using open stubs, IEEE Trans Microwave
Theory Tech 54 (2006), 2497–2502.
3. K. U-yen, E.J. Wollack, T.A. Doiron, J. Papapolymerou, and J. Laskar,
A planar bandpass filter design with wide stopband using double split-
end stepped impedance resonators, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory
Tech 54 (2006), 1237–1244.
4. J.-S.G. Hong and M.J. Lancaster, Microwave filters for RF/microwave
applications, Wiley, New York, 2002.
5. C.-F. Chen, T.-Y. Huang, and R.-B. Wu, Novel compact net-type
resonators and their applications to microstrip bandpass filters, IEEE
Trans Microwave Theory Tech 54 (2006), 755–762.
6. B.T. Tan, J.J. Yu, S.T. Chew, M.-S. Leong, and B.-L. Ooi, A minia-
turized dual-mode ring bandpass filter with a new perturbation, IEEE
Trans Microwave Theory Tech 53 (2005), 343–348.
7. R.K. Joshi and A.R. Harish, Characteristics of rotated butterfly radial stub,
In: IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium Digest, San Fran-
cisco, CA, 2006.
8. The method of moment based EM simulator, IE3D10.2, Zealand Soft-
ware, Inc., Fremont, CA. Figure 1 Oversized rectangular waveguide. Detail of the hard surface at
the bottom face. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is
© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. available at www.interscience.wiley.com]

DOI 10.1002/mop MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 49, No. 8, August 2007 1875