2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8–11 August

Design of a Six-pole Tunable Band-pass Filter with Constant

Absolute Bandwidth
Xiao-Guo Huang1 , Jin-Qi Zhang1 , Yi-Qun Lin1 , and Qian-Yin Xiang2
1
China Electronic Technology Group Corporation No. 36 Institute, Jiaxing 314033, China
2
Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610031, China

Abstract— This paper presents the design and implementation of a tunable bandpass filter
with constant absolute bandwidth. Two types of coupled microstrip lines in the anti-parallel
and pro-parallel formats with varactor-loaded λ/2 resonators are investigated to demonstrate its
advanced capacity in control of the bandwidth variation. In this design, two adjacent resonators
are coupled with each other through a short-circuited transmission line as the K inverter. To
verify the proposed approach, a compact six-pole tunable bandpass filter based on alternative
J/K inverters and λ/2 resonators is designed, and the measured results show a tuning range
from 1.9 to 2.3 GHz with a bandwidth of 580 ± 10 MHz.

1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, microstrip tunable filters with constant absolute bandwidth (CABW) [1–4] or constant
fractional bandwidth (CFBW) [5] are becoming an attractive research topic. Based on the individ-
ual and/or mixed electric and magnetic coupling schemes [1–3], several microstrip tunable filters
with CABW/CFBW variation versus central frequency of the desired passband were investigated
and designed. In [4], a dual-mode microstrip resonator was studied to develop a class of tunable
filters with CABW by controlling the tuning rate of two resonant frequencies. Note that most of the
works reported so far in [1–5] are restricted to the second-order topology and have not presented a
unified method for high-order response.
In this letter, the anti-parallel and pro-parallel coupled microstrip lines are investigated and
further utilized to make up a class of tunable filters with CABW/CFBW. Figures 1(a) and (b)
show the schematic layout and equivalent network of the proposed six-pole tunable filter with
CABW, respectively. The proposed filter only require a few varactor diodes to tune the center
frequency and do not require additional tuning elements to control J/K inverters with specified
coupling degree. Thus, the tunable filter is simple to achieve high-order characteristics and exhibit
relative low loss as experimentally validated.

(a) (b)

Figure 1: (a) Schematic layout of six-order constant absolute bandwidth tunable filter. (b) Alternative J/k
inverters equivalent network of six-order constant absolute bandwidth tunable filter.

2. COUPLED LINES AND VARACTOR-LOADED λ/2 RESONATOR

The inset figures in Figure 2(a) show the physical configuration of the two parallel-coupled mi-
crostrip lines, namely, anti- and pro-parallel coupled line [14]. The length LC1 and LC2 are defined
as the coupling lengths of the two coupled lines. Figures 2(a) and (b) portray the derived normal-
ized J-inverter susceptance and equivalent electrical length (θ/2) of the two respective coupling

3507
 2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8–11 August

structures. For comparative study, the coupling lengths of them are kept to be identical, i.e.,
LC1 = LC2 . According to Figures 2(a) and (b), the two J-susceptance values seem to vary as a
quasi-periodical function of frequency. In particular, the value achieves a maximal peak at about
110◦ for the anti-parallel line, whereas the coupling peak in the pro-parallel line occurs at the
frequencies of θ/2 = 45◦ and θ/2 = 135◦ . Meanwhile, the coupling null emerges at θ/2 = 90◦ .
In each period, all the curves can be divided into three regions: region 1 or C, region 2 or A and
D and region 3 or B and E with regarding to three cases where J-susceptance increases, remains
stationary and decreases, respectively, as frequency increases.

(a) (b)

Figure 2: (a) Normalized J-susceptance of extracted J-inverter parameters of two distinctive coupled
microstrip lines. (b) Equivalent electrical length of extracted J-inverter parameters of two distinctive coupled
microstrip lines.

According to the filter synthesis theory described in [15], the values of J-susceptance is propor-
tional to the quantity of BW · br /f0 or BW · br /f0 , where BW, f0 , and br represent the bandwidth,
center frequency and susceptance slope, respectively. For a tunable resonator, the susceptance s-
lope br varies with center frequency. Figure 3 shows the varactor-loaded λ/2 resonators. The input
admittance of the resonator, seen form the input port, is
jωCL + jYr tan θ
Yin = Yr (1)
Yr − ωC L tan θ
where Yr and θ are the characteristic admittance and the electric length of the microstrip line, and
CL is the capacitance of the varactor.

Figure 3: Varactor-loaded λ2 resonator.

According to the resonant condition, Im[Yin ] = 0 leads to

Yr
CL = − tan θ0 (2)
ω0
The susceptance slope of the varactor-loaded λ/2 microstrip resonator is defined and derived as

1 ω0 dB(ω)  θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
br =  = (3)
Yr 2 dω ω=ω0 2
For the varactor-loaded λ/2 resonator,
BW · br BW θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
= (4)
f0 f0 2

3508
2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8–11 August

where θ0 locates between π/4 and π/2.

According to the Figure 2 and Formulation 4, a tunable filter with CABW can be achieved when
the coupling electrical lengths in region 1 or C in Figure 2(a) are realized by properly choosing
the varactor. As such, a tunable filter with CFBW can be designed when the J-susceptance with
increased slopes in region A or C is chosen. To verify the above analysis, a six-pole tunable filter
with CABW is designed in Section 3, where the coupling electrical length is in region 1.

3. SIX-POLE TUNABLE BANDPASS FILTER DESIGN

Figure 1(a) shows the schematic of the presented six-order BPF with CABW. To save the overall
circuit area and to introduce two weak cross coupling routes (resonators 1 and 6, resonators 2 and
5), the resonators are reshaped as a squared loop, and the relevant J/K inverters based equivalent
network is depicted in Figure 1(b). The mainline coupling (J01 -K12 -J23 -K34 -J45 -K56 -J67 ) is in
the form of alternative J/K inverters, which are implemented in the form of a parallel coupled
microstrip line and a metallic via installed between the strip and ground, respectively. Meanwhile,
there are another two weak cross coupling J25 and J16 between the resonators 2 and 5 and resonators
1 and 6, respectively. Thus, locations of such transmission zeros could be adjusted and controlled
by varying the cross-coupling strengths J25 and J16 . For the six-order Chebyshev CABW tunable
filter, its center frequency aims to be tunable in a range of 1.9–2.3 GHz with a bandwidth of
580 MHz, and the first five normalized elements [15] are found as g0 = 1, g1 = 0.9940, g2 = 1.4131,
g3 = 1.8933, g4 = 1.5506. Thus,
√ √
J01 J67 BW · br θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
= = = 0.77 (5a)
Yr Yr f0 Yr g0 g1 2f0
√
K12 K56 J12 BW · br 1 θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
− = − = = = 0.49 · (5b)
Zr Zr Yr f0 Yr g1 g2 2f0
√
J23 J45 BW · br 1 θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
= = = 0.35 · (5c)
Yr Yr f0 Yr g2 g3 2f0
√
K34 J34 BW · br 1 θ0 − 1/2 sin 2θ0
− = = = 0.33 · (5d)
Zr Yr f0 Yr g3 g4 2f0

From (5a)–(5d), the desired values of J inverters and K inverters are shown by the solid line
in Figure 4. The physical dimensions of J01 /J67 , K12 /K56 , J23 /J45 and K34 are extracted from
simulated two-port S-parameters [8]. The inset figures in Figure 4 show J and K inverters. Figure 4
also portray the extracted (dot lines) normalized J and K inverters, respectively. In order to take
into account all the parasitic effects such as discontinuities and frequency dispersion, the presented
tunable BPF is then simulated and its overall layout is determined after fine-tuning. The final
geometrical parameters are shown in Figure 1(a).

Figure 4: Desired and extracted normalized J01 , J23 , Figure 5: Simulated and measured S-parameters for
K12 and K34 with frequency. bias voltage of 0 and 30 V.

3509
 2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8–11 August

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Based on the above-described design, a six-order CABW tunable BPF is fabricated on a 0.8-mm
F4B-2 substrate with εr = 2.65. CL is realized by connecting a varactor diode (BB179). The strip
width of the microstrip line is chosen as 1.0 mm with the characteristic impedance of Zr = 60.54 Ω.
The DC biasing circuit is formed by connecting two RF chip inductors (0603CS82N) in order to
reduce the RF-signal leakage via the bias network. Figure 5 displays the simulated and measured
frequency response of the six-pole tunable filter. The measured results are found to agree with
the simulated ones. The measured results show that the center frequency can be tuned from 1.9
to 2.3 GHz with an insertion loss of 2.8 to 3.2 dB. The absolute bandwidth of the filter is about
580 ± 10 MHz across the entire tuning range, indicating the reasonably good CABW performance.
Especially, three pairs of transmission zeros are created at the upper and lower sides of the desired
passband. It is noted that if these transmission zeros are put much closer to the core passband, the
resultant passband does not strictly function as a Chebyshev frequency response. The respective J
and K inverters need to be determined from the coupling matrix m with the prescribed generalized-
Chebyshev in-band frequency response [16]. The photography of a fabricated filter is given in
Figure 5, and its overall area is about 40 mm × 35 mm.
5. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a constant absolute bandwidth tunable filter is proposed and designed based on
anti-parallel-coupled lines and varactor diodes. The J-susceptances of anti- and pro-parallel-
coupled lines are at first analyzed. Then, tunable bandpass filters with constant absolute band-
width/constant fractional bandwidth can be designed by adding the varactor diodes to parallel-
coupling lines. In final, a tunable Constant absolute bandwidth filter composed of alternative J/K
inverters and varactor-loaded λ/2 microstrip line resonators is designed, fabricated and measured,
providing an experimental verification on the predicted frequency response.
REFERENCES
1. Park, S. J. and G. M. Rebeiz, “Low-loss two-pole tunable filters with three different predefined
bandwidth characteristics,” IEEE Trans. on Microw. Theory and Tech., Vol. 56, No. 5, 1137–
1148, May 2008.
2. El-Tanani, M. A. and G. M. Rebeiz, “Corrugated microstrip coupled lines for constant absolute
bandwidth tunable filters,” IEEE Trans. on Microw. Theory and Tech., Vol. 58, No. 4, 956–963,
Apr. 2010.
3. Xiang, Q. Y., Q. Y. Feng, X. G. Huang, and D. H. Jia, “Electrical tunable microstrip LC
bandpass filters with constant bandwidth,” IEEE Trans. on Microw. Theory and Tech., Vol. 61,
No. 3, 1124–1130, Mar. 2013.
4. Tang, W. X. and J. S. Hong, “Varactor-tuned dual-mode bandpass filters,” IEEE Trans. on
Microw. Theory and Tech., Vol. 58, No. 8, 2213–2219, Aug. 2010.
5. Anand, A., J. Small, D. Peroulis, and X. G. Liu, “Theory and design of octave tunable filters
with lumped tuning elements,” IEEE Trans. on Microw. Theory and Tech., Vol. 61, No. 12,
4353–4364, Dec. 2013.
6. Sun, S. and L. Zhu, “Novel design of microstrip bandpass filters with a controllable dual-
passband response: Description and implementation,” IEICE Trans. on Electron., Vol. E89-C,
197–202, 2006.
7. Hong, J. S. and M. J. Lancaster, Microstrip Filters for RF/Microwave Applications, Wiley,
New York, 2001.
8. Zhang, S. B. and L. Zhu, “Synthesis method for even-order symmetrical chebyshev bandpass
filters with alternative J/K inverters and λ/4 resonators,” IEEE Trans. on Microw. Theory
and Tech., Vol. 61, No. 2 , 808–816, Feb. 2013.

3510