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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS 1

Compact Quad-Band Bandpass Filter for

DCS/WLAN/WiMAX/5G Wi-Fi Application
Yao Zhang, Li Gao, Student Member, IEEE, and Xiu Yin Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—This letter presents a compact quad-band bandpass

filter for DCS/WLAN/WiMAX/5G Wi-Fi applications. It utilizes
two resonators. One is a multi-stub-loaded resonator operating at
the first, second and fourth passband frequencies. The other one is
a short-end stub-loaded resonator used to yield the third passband.
Among the four passbands, the highest one is designed to cover a
wide bandwidth (5.15–5.85 GHz) for 5G Wi-Fi applications. The
design procedures are discussed in detail and the simulated and
measured results are presented.
Index Terms—Bandpass filter (BPF), compact size, 5G Wi-Fi-
band, quad-band.

I. INTRODUCTION

W ITH the development of wireless communication,

multi-band bandpass filters (BPFs) have been widely
researched. A lot of structures and methods have been proposed Fig. 1. Configuration of the proposed BPF.
to design high performance multi-band BPFs [1]. Recently,
much attention is being paid to the next-generation Wi-Fi sys-
WiMAX/5G Wi-Fi applications with high selectivity. The 5G
tems (5G Wi-Fi) due to its high-speed and convenient wireless
Wi-Fi band is covered by a fourth-order resonator. DCS and
access. Meanwhile, the other communication systems, such as
WLAN bands are realized by adding stubs to the fourth-order
DCS and others (e.g., WLAN and Wi-MAX), should be also
resonator without affecting the 5G Wi-Fi band. The WiMAX
accommodated.
band is covered by a short-stub-loaded resonator without
Till now, many efforts have been devoted to achieve this
adding extra area. The four passbands can be controlled indi-
design target. The most popular method is using multi-set of
vidually. This study provides a simple and effective method to
resonators. Utilizing this method, quad-band BPFs operating
design a compact quad-band BPF without complex design and
at 1.57/2.45/3.5/5.2 GHz [2] and 1.8/2.4/3.5/5.8 GHz [3] and
fabrication process.
2.4/3.5/5.2/6.8 GHz [4] and 1.5/2.5/3.5/5.5 GHz [5] are de-
signed. However, they are difficult to satisfy the bandwidth
II. FILTER DESIGN
requirements. For instance, the 5 GHz passband only ranges
5.62 to 5.896 GHz [3], which cannot meet the demands of 5G Fig. 1 shows the structure of the proposed microstrip filter.
Wi-Fi-band applications. In [3], the bandwidths of the second It utilizes two resonators. One is an eight-mode resonator op-
and third band are 760 and 380 MHz, which is too wide for erating at the first, second and fourth passband. The other is a
WLAN/WiMAX applications. In [6] and [7], stub-loaded mul- short-end stub-loaded resonator, which is used to form the third
timode resonators are employed. Unfortunately, these filters passband. Due to the four coupling sections denoted as Cou-
cannot cover the 5G WiFi band. pling 1, 2, 3 and 4 as illustrated in Fig. 1, the stub-to-stub cou-
This letter proposes a compact planar quad-band BPF cov- pling can be easily controlled and extra transmission paths are
ering 1.8/2.45/3.5/5.15–5.85 GHz bands for DCS/WLAN/ realized. Moreover, source-load coupling and hook-shape feed
lines are adopted to generate transmission zeros to achieve high
selectivity.
Manuscript received May 14, 2015; accepted July 05, 2015. This work was
supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 Program)
The analysis of the eight-mode resonator is as follows. The
under Grant 2014CB339900 and the Natural Science Foundation of China and resonator is modified from the circuit in Fig. 2(a). It consists
Guangdong under Grants 61271060, 61422106, and S2013050014593. of four resonators with same resonant frequency and three
Y. Zhang is with the School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South coupling sections. The is expressed as follows:
China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China.
L. Gao and X. Y. Zhang are with the School of Electronic and Informa-
tion Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641,
(1)
China and also with the Shenzhen Key Lab of MWWC, City University of Hong
Kong Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen 518000, China (e-mail: zhangxi- where is the speed of light in free space and is the effective
uyin@hotmail.com)
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online dielectric constant of the substrate. Due to the inter-resonator
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. coupling, the resonant mode is split and thus the overall circuit
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2015.2463227 exhibits four resonance modes with the frequencies

1531-1309 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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2 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS

Fig. 3. Simulated against (a) ; (b) .

Fig. 2. (a) Quad-mode resonator; (b) Six-mode resonator; (c) Eight-mode res-
onator; (d) Resonant modes of the three resonators.

TABLE I
PARAMETERS FOR CONTROLLING THE PASSBANDS

and . These four modes are used to realize the fourth pass-
band.
Then two microstrip lines with the length of are added
to connect the two center points of resonators 1 and 2 (A, B)
as well as 3 and 4 (C, D), as shown in Fig. 2(b). According to
the even- and odd-mode analysis [8], at , the voltage at the
center point is zero due to the half-wavelength resonance and
thus the loading parts do not affect the previous four modes but
can generate a new mode, named

(2)

Due to the coupling Section 2, this mode will be split into

two modes, and , which are used to form the second pass-
band. Similarly, the microstrip line with the length is con-
nected to the center points E and F, and the shorted microstrip
Fig. 4. Simulated against (a) ; (b) ; (c) ; (d) .
line with length is added at the center point G, as shown
in Fig. 2(c). They also do not affect the previous six modes, but
can generate two new modes and , which are six modes and the previous four modes are fixed. When it be-
expressed as comes the circuit in Fig. 2(c), there are eight modes and the pre-
vious six modes are fixed. It is seen that the loading parts 1 and
(3) 2 do not affect the original modes. This verifies the analysis.
Based on the above analysis, the design procedure is given as
(4) follows. 1) We firstly design the fourth passband with the center
frequency of 5.5 GHz, 3 dB bandwidth of 15% and return loss of
15 dB. It can be regarded as a fourth-order filter. The center fre-
These two modes ( and ) are used to realize the first pass- quency is determined by the resonator length . Its
band. bandwidth is controlled by the coupling coefficients which are
To demonstrate the analysis, some simulations are carried out required to be: .
by ADS. The results are shown in Fig. 2(d). It can be observed is determined by the and is determined by and
when there is only the circuit shown in Fig. 2(a), there are four . Based on the required coupling coefficients, the and
modes. When it is modified to the circuit in Fig. 2(b), there are are determined to be 0.15 mm and 0.25 mm, respectively. 2)
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

ZHANG et al.: COMPACT QUAD-BAND BANDPASS FILTER FOR DCS/WLAN/WIMAX/5G WI-FI APPLICATION 3

third passband. These results demonstrate that the bandwidths

can be nearly controlled individually.
III. CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION
Following the above design procedure, a quad-band BPF is
fabricated on the substrate with a relative dielectric of 3.38,
thickness of 0.81 mm and loss tangent of 0.0027. The dimen-
sions are chosen as (all in mm):

. The
overall size is 19.8 mm 15.8 mm or 0.19 is
the guided wavelength at 1.8 GHz. The photograph of the fab-
Fig. 5. Simulated and measured results of the proposed filter. ricated quad-band filter is shown in the inset of Fig. 5.
Fig. 5 shows the simulated and measured responses. The four
TABLE II bands are centered at 1.8/2.45/3.5/5.5 with the 3 dB bandwidths
COMPARISON WITH PREVIOUS WORK
of 6.7/4.2/3.7/14.8%, which can satisfy the requirements of the
DCS/WLAN/WiMAX/5G Wi-Fi systems. The measured min-
imum insertion losses are 1.5, 1.7, 2.3 and 1.8 dB and the return
losses are better than 15 dB in four bands. Six transmission ze-
roes are generated at 0.85, 2.1, 2.97, 3.75, 4.38 and 6.45 GHz.
Among them, TZ1, TZ2, TZ5 and TZ6 are generated due to the
multiple transmission paths. TZ3 and TZ4 are generated due to
source-load coupling.
The comparison is tabulated in Table II. It can be observed the
proposed work realizes the required bandwidth. Although the
filter in [2] can cover the operating band of 5G WiFi, it cannot
meet the bandwidth demands of WLAN/WiMAX applications.
Meanwhile, the proposed work features compact size, high se-
lectivity and controllable passbands.
IV. CONCLUSION
Then the second passband is designed to cover 2.4 GHz WLAN
system with the 3 dB bandwidth of 5%. The operating frequency This letter has presented a compact high-selectivity
is determined by the resonator with the length . The quad-band BPF for DCS/WLAN/WiMAX/5G Wi-Fi systems.
bandwidth is determined by and . 3) The first band is de- The mechanism and design procedure have been presented.
signed to cover 1.8 GHz DCS system with the 3 dB bandwidth Measured results reveal that the proposed circuit features
of 5%. The frequency can be tuned by without affecting the compact size, high passband selectivity and simple design.
second and fourth bands. The bandwidth is controlled by tuning All these characteristics make the proposed filter attractive in
the length . 4) After that, the third passband is designed to multi-band wireless communication systems.
cover 3.5 GHz WiMAX system with the 3 dB bandwidth of 4%.
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