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The design of base-band IQ filters for digital receivers

Conference Paper · October 2015

DOI: 10.1109/RadarConf.2015.7411901

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 1

THE DESIGN OF BASE-BAND IQ FILTERS FOR

DIGITAL RECEIVERS
PW van der Walt*, Life Senior Member, IEEE, Werner Steyn§ , Member, IEEE, and Martinette van der Merwe¶ ,
Member, IEEE
Reutech Radar Systems, Stellenbosch, South Africa
*pwvdw@reutech.co.za § werners@reutech.co.za ¶ martinettevdm@reutech.co.za
Copyright 2015 IEEE. Published in the 2015 IEEE Radar Conference, scheduled for 27-30 October 2015, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Personal use of
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Abstract—In digital receivers with base-band sampling there is

a requirement for low-pass filters in the I and Q channels that will
track accurately in amplitude and phase. The general amplitude
and phase sensitivity properties of LC filters are reviewed to
arrive at a design strategy for filters for systems with strict
requirements. Filters meeting tight attenuation specifications with
amplitude and phase unbalances of less than 0.1 dB and 0.3◦
and high far-out stopband attenuation in the presence of element
parasitics were successfully implemented with this technique.

I. I NTRODUCTION

In digital receivers with base-band sampling, the RF signal

spectrum is translated to base-band with an IQ-demodulator
to obtain an analytical base-band signal - that is a signal with
independent positive and negative frequency side-bands - in a
form I + jQ. The positive and negative frequency signals are
recovered by phase shifting the Q component through 90◦ and
adding or subtracting it from the I component. Small errors
in amplitude or phase will result in imperfect cancellation
of the unwanted signal, known as the image, and a finite
image rejection ratio IRR [1]. Modern demodulators exhibit
extremely high performance, with IQ amplitude errors less
that 0.1 dB and phase errors less than 0.4◦ over a base-band
bandwidth of more than a 100 MHz, with a resultant IRR better
than 50 dB.
In a digital receiver, a pair of analogue filters must be
provided in the I and Q channels to filter out any interfering
signals in the aliasing zones of the sampler, as shown in Figure
1. In order not to degrade the performance of the demodulator,
the frequency responses of these filters and the associated
amplifiers must be matched in amplitude and phase to a level
comparable with the demodulator error, typically better than
0.1 dB in amplitude and 0.3◦ in phase while ensuring a stop-
band attenuation of the order of 60 dB.
To ensure that the filters will require minimal tuning and
also track over temperature, they must be designed with very
low amplitude and phase sensitivity to changes in element
values. In this paper an approach to the design of accurately
matched low-pass LC filters is developed.
Figure 1: The different aliasing zones for a sampling process
at a frequency fs around multiples of the Nyquist frequency,
fn = fs/2 can be processed with different technologies to
eliminate unwanted signals. Unwanted signals in the higher
aliasing zone can only be filtered out with an analogue filter.
The secondary filters in the block diagram have high pass-
band cut-off frequencies so that they do not materially affect
the passband response of the system.
II. S ENSITIVITY CHARACTERISTICS OF LOW- PASS FILTERS
A. Sensitivity functions
The well-known sensitivity function [2],
gi ∂H(s, g) gi ∂ ln H(s, g)
SgH(s,g) = = (1)
i
H(s, g) ∂gi ∂gi
relates a relative infinitesimal change of the circuit function
H(s, g) to a relative infinitesimal change in the value of the
member gi of the vector of element values g. Under steady-
state conditions with sinusoidal excitation, the frequency re-
 2

sponse is found with s = jω and H is in general complex so

that

ln H(jω, g) = ln |H(jω, g)| + j arg H(jω, g), (2)

and
 
∂ ln |H(jω, g)| ∂ arg H(jω, g)
SgH(jω,g) = gi +j
i
∂gi ∂gi
gi ∂|H(jω, g)| gi ∂ arg H(jω, g)
= +j (a) Filter with 0.2 dB pass-band ripple.
|H(jω, g)| ∂gi ∂gi
= Sg|H(jω)|
i
+ jS arg H(jω)
gi . (3)

The real part of this sensitivity function relates the infinites-

imal relative change in amplitude response to an infinitesimal
relative change in element value, while the imaginary part
relates an infinitesimal absolute change in phase response to
an infinitesimal relative change in element value.

B. Sensitivity characteristics of LC low-pass ladder filters (b) Filter with 0.01 dB pass-band ripple.
To gain some insight into the sensitivity properties of LC Figure 2: The pass-band amplitude sensitivities of a fifth-
low-pass ladders, we calculate the amplitude and phase sensit- order Chebyshev filter, relating relative changes in amplitude
ivities of a fifth-order doubly-terminated Chebyshev filter. The response to relative changes in the element values of the
filter is symmetrical and elements at opposite sides of the two- reactive elements for a passband normalised to unit frequency.
port are equal so that only three distinct sensitivity responses
are obtained. The system function in this case is the transducer
function H(s) (the inverse of a transfer function) [3, p. 101],
[4, p. 197]. The transducer function has the property that with
sinusoidal excitation the attenuation|H(jω)|2 = PPavail
load
≥1=
1+K(ω)2 ,where Pavail is the power available from the source
and Pload is the power delivered to the load termination. For
a Chebyshev filter, K(ω) is a scaled Chebyshev polynomial.
Figure 2 shows the amplitude sensitivities for the filter in the
pass-band. It is noteworthy that the sensitivities to changes in
element values are zero at frequencies where the attenuation of (a) Filter with 0.2 dB pass-band ripple.
the filter equals zero (in other words, at the frequencies of the
reflection zeros). This is because, according to the conservation
of energy principle, the attenuation of a doubly terminated
filter with equal terminations cannot be less than zero dB. An
increase or a decrease in the value of an element can only lead
to an increase in attenuation, so that the curve of attenuation
vs. element value has a turning point at the nominal element
value, and therefore zero incremental sensitivity. Reasoning
along this line, we conclude that the amplitude sensitivities
can be reduced by decreasing the maximum attenuation, or
(b) Filter with 0.01 dB pass-band ripple.
ripple, in the pass-band [4, ch. 10]. A comparison of Figures
2 (a) and (b) shows that this is indeed the case. We also note Figure 3: The pass-band phase sensitivities of a fifth-order
that the sensitivity increases towards the edge of the pass-band. Chebyshev filter, relating absolute changes in phase response
Figure 3 shows the phase sensitivities for the same filters. to relative changes in the element values of the reactive
Of note is that the sensitivities are all of the same sign, elements.
which leads to the notion that the phase sensitivity may be
proportional to the phase angle as will be shown below. The
pass-band ripple has a relatively small influence on the phase a single sensitivity measure by taking the square root of the
sensitivity in the lower half of the pass-band. Close to the end sum of the squared sensitivities (RSS),
of the pass-band the phase sensitivity rises moderately with
increasing ripple. s 2
X
Both sensitivity measures are difficult to evaluate because |H(jω)|
SRSS =
|H(jω)|
Sgi
of the many component sensitivities involved. We can define g

(a) Root of the sum of squared amplitude sensitivities and the
pass-band ripple response.
(b) RSS phase sensitivity together with the total phase and the
relative RSS phase sensitivity.
Figure 4: The (a) attenuation and root of the sum of squared
(RSS) amplitude sensitivies and (b) phase and RSS phase
sensitivieties and the relative RSS phase sensitivity in the pass-
band of a fifth-order Chebyshev filter with 0.15 dB amplitude
ripples in the pass-band.
s •
2
arg H(jω)
X arg H(jω)
SRSS = Sgi . (4)
g
The basis for this is that, if we assume randomly distributed
component values with a given standard deviation of compon-
ent value for all components, the RSS sensitivity multiplied
with the component standard deviation is the expected standard
deviation of the response. Figure 4 shows the RSS amplitude
and phase sensitivities for the example Chebyshev filter with
0.15 dB ripple in the pass-band. Figure 4 (a) again shows
the zero amplitude sensitivity property of Chebyshev filters at
the frequencies of the reflection zeros, while the relative RSS
phase sensitivity,
arg H(jω) 1 arg H(jω)
relSRSS = S , (5)
arg H(jω) RSS
remains virtually constant over a large part of the pass-band
in Figure 4 (b). This confirms our conjecture above that the
absolute phase sensitivity is roughly proportional to the phase
of the response. These observations lead to a design strategy
for well-matched IQ filters.
III. D ESIGN STRATEGY
The design strategy to ensure low amplitude sensitivity is
simply to maintain the pass-band attenuation close to zero.
This can readily be accomplished with a filter with an equi-
ripple pass-band response.
3
The strategy to ensure low phase sensitivity is to keep the
magnitude of the phase angle response small over the relevant
part of the pass-band.
The group delay of a transducer function response is given
by the derivative of the phase angle with respect to radian
frequency [5, ch. 2], and the total area under the group delay
response for a filter of order N equals N π/2, the asymptotic
high-frequency value of the phase angle if the discrete steps
in phase at transmission zeros are left out of account. In order
to keep the pass-band phase angle small over the lower part of
the pass-band, we need a filter with a rapid cut-off attenuation
characteristic, so that we can scale the cut-off frequency to a
high value in order to spread the group delay characteristic
over as wide a frequency range as possible and thus reduce
the amplitude of the group delay characteristic. We ideally
also need a response with a group delay characteristic that
has a small value in the lower part of the pass band and a
large peak near the cut-off frequency of the filter. In other
words, we want the phase angle to remain small over a large
part of the pass-band and then rapidly increase to its final
value of N π/2 near the edge of the pass-band. The family
of elliptic function filters with equi-ripple pass-band and stop-
band responses behaves like this.
Further requirements for the desired filter include:
• The filter should preferably be symmetrical, with equal
source and load terminations, to facilitate implementation
and accurate measurements with a network analyser. This
requirement can be met with an odd-order filter.
The filter should have multiple poles of attenuation (i.e.
transmission zeros) at infinity to ensure that a high
level of attenuation is maintained at high frequencies,
where the parasitic series inductance of capacitors and
parallel capacitance of inductors degrade the attenuation.
Odd-order elliptic function filters have only one pole of
attenuation at infinity.
• The filter must be suitable for implementation in balanced
form to minimise susceptibility to common mode noise.
Our preferred topology is where the poles of attenuation
are formed by shunt branches of the filter circuit
We therefore investigate the role of transmission zeros at finite
frequencies on the phase response.
Figure 5 shows the attenuation and group delay responses of
fifth-order Butterworth, Chebyshev and elliptic function filters
for a stop-band attenuation specification of 50 dB. To facilitate
the comparison, the edge of the stop-band has been frequency
scaled to unit frequency for all three filters.
The figure shows that the elliptic function filter is by far
the filter with the lowest pass-band group delay (and therefore
the smallest pass-band phase angle). While the areas under
the group delay responses are equal for the three filters, the
elliptic function filter performs better not only because the
ratio of peak to minimum group delay is the largest for this
response, but also because the rapid cut-off rate of this filter
allows us to scale the pass-band cut-off frequency to a higher
value, so that the group delay is spread over a wider frequency
range and therefore must have a smaller amplitude to comply
with the area requirement.

Figure 5: The attenuation and delay responses of fifth-order
Butterworth, Chebyshev and Elliptic Function filters for a
stop-band specification of 50 dB. The maximum pass-band
reflection coefficient for the Chebyshev and Elliptic filters is
20%.
Figure 6: Attenuation and group delay responses of N=3, 5
and 7 elliptic function filters for a stopband specification of
50 dB.
Figure 6 shows attenuation and delay responses for third,
fifth and seventh-order elliptical function filter responses. We
note that the higher order filter has a smaller pass-band group
delay than the lower order filters because of its sharper group
delay response coupled to its more rapid cut-off rate. In
the next section we will introduce a quasi-elliptic filter that
meets all our requirements with performance comparable to
an elliptic-function filter.
IV. D ESIGN
We illustrate the strategy with a sample design based on a
pass-band specification fp = 0.7fn , so that fstop = fs − fp =
1.3fn (see Figure 1). The edge of the stop-band is normalised
to unit frequency so that the edge of the system pass-band
scales to 0.538.
Figure 7 (a) shows the circuit of a seventh-order elliptic
function filter. This filter has one attenuation pole at infinite
frequency and is prone to degradation of the high frequency
attenuation due to the parasitic parallel capacitance of the
inductors. Figure 7 (b) shows the same basic topology but
with capacitors added across the two ports, to form a ninth-
order filter with three attenuation poles at infinity. A quasi-
elliptical response for this circuit was calculated by means of
4
(a) Seventh-order elliptical filter circuit.
(b) Ninth-order quasi-elliptical filter.
Figure 7: The circuit of (a) a seventh-order elliptical function
filter with one pole of attenuation at infinite frequency, and
(b) the ninth-order quasi-elliptical filter with three poles of
attenuation at infinite frequency.
a Chebyshev Rational Function [5, ch. 8]. The response is sim-
ilar to an N = 9 elliptic function response but with a pair of
finite attenuation poles moved to infinity. A further departure
from an elliptical response is to merge two attenuation poles
to form a double attenuation pole at the edge of the stop-band
at a frequency 1.0, realised with elements g2, g9 and g6, g11
in 7 (b). With this arrangement, the filter becomes physically
symmetrical. The double pole also helps us to ensure that we
get a deep and broad null even when using lossy components.
We also find that the double attenuation pole increases the
height of the group delay peak, further lowering the phase
angle in the lower half of the pass-band. The frequency of the
remaining attenuation pole at a frequency 1.231, realised with
elements g4 and g10, was chosen to give a nearly equi-ripple
stop-band response. The normalised filter cut-off frequency to
the pass-band ripple value is 0.862.
Figure 8 shows the amplitude responses of 13th order
Butterworth (B) and Chebyshev 0.15 dB pass-band ripple
(C) responses together with the response of an N=7 elliptical
(EL) and N=9 quasi-elliptical (QE) approximation. N = 13
is the lowest order of a Butterworth filter that will meet the
system attenuation specification. As expected, the group delay
in the pass-band is much lower with the elliptical and quasi-
elliptical filters than for the Butterworth and Chebyshev filters.
Surprisingly, the group delay of the quasi-elliptical filter is
very nearly the same as that of the elliptical filter in the
system pass-band, in spite of the larger area under the group-
delay curve. This is because of its rapid cut-off rate. Note
that the double attenuation pole results in a wide null at the
edge of the stop-band compared to that of the elliptic filter,
providing assurance that the stop-band performance will not
be very sensitive to component tolerances.
Finally, we show the root of the sum of squared phase
sensitivities for the 9th order quasi-elliptical filter compared
with that of the 7th order elliptical filter in Figure 9.

Figure 8: The pass-band amplitude responses of thirteenth-
order Butterworth and Chebyshev filters, a seventh-order el-
liptical function filter and the ninth-order quasi-elliptical filter.
Figure 9: RSS Phase sensitivity and relative RSS Phase Sens-
itivity for the 9th order quasi-elliptical and 7th order elliptical
function filter.
The quasi-elliptical filter performs slightly better than the
elliptical filter. The relative RSS phase sensitivity remains
virtually constant, again confirming our earlier conjecture that
the phase sensitivity is roughly proportional to the phase angle.
V. I MPLEMENTATION
The filter was designed for a system with a sampling
frequency of 200 MHz and IQ pass-band of 70 MHz. The
cut-off frequency of the filter is at 112 MHz. The RSS phase
◦
sensitivity of the filter rises to 1.4 radians or 1.4 × 180
π = 80
◦
per relative change in component values, or about 0.8 for
component tolerances of 1%. Provision is therefore made for
aligning the filters with two trimming capacitors to adjust the
element values g11 and g12 in Figure 7 (b). These elements
were chosen by examining the sensitivity curves for all reactive
elements of the filter and selecting two elements that would
be able to compensate the different sensitivity characteristics.
Note that, because of the symmetry of the filter, the sensitivity
characteristics of elements mirrored around the centre line
through g4 and g10 will be the same.
Since we are only interested in the pass-band response
up to 70 MHz while the cut-off frequency is 112 MHz,
droop towards the edge of the pass-band response caused by
lossy components is not a very big concern. Because of size
5
(a) Implemented filter. The source and load resistances
are both 100 ohms.
(b) Physical I & Q filter implementation
Figure 10: Physical implementation of a pair of IQ base-band
filters with 0603 surface-mount components.
Figure 11: The predicted filter amplitude and group delay re-
sponses with nearest available component values, with respect-
ively lossless and lossy components. With lossy components
the edge of the pass-band gets rounded and the group delay
peak is lowered but the group delay curve does not spread out
to the lower frequencies.
constraints, the filter was implemented with 0603 size surface
mount inductors and capacitors, as shown in Figure 10. The
component values are shown in Figure (10) (a).
The simulated amplitude and group delay responses of the
filter implemented with nearest available component values are
shown for the lossless and lossy case in Figure 11.
The passband droop is minimal at frequencies below 70
MHz. While the group delay peak is much reduced with
lossy components, group delay is unchanged at the lower
frequencies. Also of interest to note is that the area under
the group delay curve is reduced with lossy components,
because the poles of attenuation on the imaginary axis, that
do not contribute to the group delay, have moved into the

(a) Amplitude response, 10 dB/div
(b) Pass-band amplitude and phase difference between channels.
Figure 12: The measured performance of a set of filters.
The filters are integrated into the amplification chain so that
measured responses are those of the complete IQ system, up
to the input of the analogue to digital converter.
left half plane, where they contribute a negative group delay
component.
The measured responses of the implemented IQ filters are
shown in Figure 12. Note that these responses are measured
with the filters integrated into the amplifier chain and therefore
include all deviations in amplitude and phase of the rest of the
chain. Two low-order Chebyshev low-pass filters with high
cut-off frequencies that are part of the chain increase the
attenuation at frequencies above 150 MHz.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper the sensitivity characteristics of low-pass filters
were investigated to arrive at a design strategy for matched
baseband filters in the I and Q channels of digital receivers. It
is shown that filters with a rapid cut-off response are required
so that the edge of the filter passband can be much higher
in frequency than the edge of the signal pass-band. A quasi-
6
Figure 13: The amplitude and phase responses of the ideal
brick-wall filter.
elliptical filter response was defined that was used to design a
set of filters with exceptional phase and amplitude matching.
A question arises as to the optimality of the filter. An answer
to this question can be found examining the phase response
of the ideal brick-wall filter. Writing the transducer function
in logarithmic form,
ln H(jω) = α(ω) + jφ(ω), (6)
α is the attenuation in nepers and φ the phase angle in radians.
The attenuation response of the ideal brick-wall filter is shown
in Figure 13.
We can use the Hilbert transform to find the phase response
of the brick-wall filter as [6, ch. 10], [5, ch. 2]
2Amin ω + ωc
φ(ω) = ln . (7)
π ω − ωc
Figure 14 shows the phase response of a brick-wall filter
together with that of an N = 13 Chebyshev filter, an N=7
elliptical filter and the N=9 quasi-elliptical filter of this paper,
with the 60 dB stop-band frequency for all three filters scaled
to unity. It is clear that the quasi-elliptical filter performs very
well, with a phase angle about 30% larger than that of the
brick-wall filter. There is not much to be gained with a more
complex low-pass filter.
R EFERENCES
[1] B. Razavi, “Design considerations for direct-conversion receivers,” IEEE
Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal
Processing, 1997.
[2] S. K. Mitra, Analysis and Synthesis of Linear Active Networks. Prentice-
Hall, Inc., 1969.
[3] R. J. Cameron, C. M. Kudsia, and R. R. Mansour, Microwave Filters for
Communication Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.
[4] G. Temes and J. LaPatra, Introduction to Circuit Synthesis and Design.
McGrawHill, 1977.
[5] D. S. Humpherys, The Analysis, Design, and Synthesis of Electrical
Filters. Prentice-Hall, 1970.
[6] A. Papoulis, The Fourier Integral and its Applications. McGraw-Hill,
1962.
 7

Figure 14: The phase responses of an N=13 Chebyshev filter

with 0.15 dB pass-band ripple, an N=7 elliptic filter and the
quasi-elliptical filter with 0.15 dB pass-band ripple, as well as
that of the ideal brick-wall filter, with all stop-band edges at
unit frequency. The phase angle of the quasi-elliptical filter is
only about 30% larger than that of the ideal brick-wall filter.

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