196 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO.

4, APRIL 2010

A New Dual-Band Microstrip Bandpass

Filter Using Net-Type Resonators
Chao-Hsiung Tseng, Member, IEEE, and Hsin-Yung Shao

AbstractIn this letter, a new dual-band microstrip band-

pass filter is developed using net-type resonators. The net-type
resonator is designed to simultaneously operate at two closely
specified resonant frequencies, 1 and 2 , and then applied to
construct a dual-band filter based on the filter design concept
of adding extra coupled resonators. The dual-band filter with
the elliptic function response is designed, implemented and ex-
perimentally verified in this letter. The measured results of the
developed filter are in a good agreement with the simulated
results by full-wave electromagnetic simulator. In addition, the
developed filter not only has an excellent mid-band rejection, but
also provides a wide stopband suppression.

Index TermsDaul-passband, microstrip filter, net-type res-

onator, stepped-impedance resonator (SIR).

I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. (a) =2 and (b) =4 stepped-impedance resonators, and their (c) equiv-
alent net-type resonators and (c) folded net-type resonators with impedance ra-
tios (1) K = Z =Z < 1 and (2) K = Z =Z > 1.
HE dual-band bandpass filter (BPF) is a key component
T for realization of a dual-band wireless communication
system. Since the spurious responses of the stepped-impedance
resonator (SIR) [1], [2] can be flexibly controlled by the im-
pedances and electrical lengths of the cascaded transmission
lines, the SIRs are popularly employed to implement the planar
dual-band BPFs [3][8]. In [3][7], the SIRs shown in
Fig. 1(a-1) and (a-2) are employed to design dual-band filters
with two passbands at frequencies and . The
frequency ratio determines which type of SIRs (
or ) should be adopted.
For size reduction, the SIR shown in Fig. 1(b-1) was
evolved into the net-type resonator [9] depicted in Fig. 1(c-1)
and (d-1), and then exploited to design a single passband filter.
As shown in Fig. 2, by choosing SIRs with , the wide Fig. 2. Spurious resonant frequencies of the =4 stepped-impedance resonator
stopband rejections are can be achieved in [9]. However, these with K = Z =Z < 1 and K = Z =Z > 1.
net-type resonators cannot be used to implement filters for dual-
band cell phone (0.9/1.8 GHz) or WLAN (2.45/5.7 GHz) appli- with the elliptic function response. Unlike the resonators in [9],
cations. the net-type resonator in the region shown in Fig. 2 is de-
In this letter, based on the design concept of adding extra cou- veloped to achieve two closely specified resonant frequencies.
pled resonator sections in [10], the dual-band net-type resonator The filter developed in this letter not only has two transmission
is developed, and then applied to implement a dual-band BPF zeros to improve the selectivity of each passband, but also pro-
vides a wide stopband suppression and an excellent mid-band
rejection between two passbands.
Manuscript received November 06, 2009; revised January 13, 2010. First pub-
lished March 01, 2010; current version published April 07, 2010. This work II. DUAL-BAND NET-TYPE RESONATOR
was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan under Grants NSC
97-2221-E-011-020-MY2 and NSC 98-3114-P-011-001-Y. To design the SIR with two close resonant frequencies,
The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, National and , the circuit structure shown in Fig. 1(b-2)
Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan. (e-mail:
chtseng@mail.ntust.edu.tw). is adopted in this letter. It is comprised of two transmission lines
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2010.2042549 with the equal electrical length and the impedance ratio
1531-1309/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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TSENG AND SHAO: NEW DUAL-BAND MICROSTRIP BPF 197

Fig. 3. Resonant frequencies of the net-type resonator with K = 1:57 and 3.

Fig. 4. (a) Coupling structure and (b) schematic layout of the dual-band BPF
using net-type resonators.

Fig. 5. (a) Circuit photograph of the developed filter. (b) Simulated and mea-
. The high impedance line is kept open-cir- sured results covering two passbands and their (c) enlarged views of responses.
cuited while the low impedance line is connected to the
ground. Hence, the first two resonant frequencies and
of this SIR can be related by [1] of the net-type resonators with and
.
(1)
III. DESIGN OF DUAL-BAND FILTER
where is the impedance ratio . As two cascaded trans-
Based on the design concept in [10], the coupling structure
mission lines of the SIR have equal electrical length, indicated
shown in Fig. 4(a) is exploited to develop the dual-band filter
in Fig. 1(b-2) can be expressed as [1]
with the elliptic response. The resonators 1 and 4 are designed
(2) to simultaneously operate at the center frequencies and
of the first and second passbands. The resonators and are
The low impedance line can be equivalent to three parallel- designed to operate at while the resonators and are
connected stubs as shown in Fig. 1(c-2). Since the electrical designed to operate at . In this letter, the resonators 1 and 4 are
lengths of two sections of the SIR in Fig. 1(a) are set to equal, realized by the folded net-type resonators shown in Fig. 1(d-2),
the net-type resonator can be folded to a square box shape as while the resonators , , , and are implemented by
shown in Fig. 1(d-2). Note that neither the value of nor SIRs illustrated in Fig. 1(b-1). The schematic layout of the dual-
is restricted to an integer. Fig. 3 shows the resonant frequencies band BPF is illustrated in Fig. 4(b).

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198
Fig. 6. Measured wideband response of the developed dual-band BPF.
The filter is fabricated on a RO4003 substrate with a thick-
ness of 0.508 mm, a dielectric constant of 3.38, and a loss tan-
gent of 0.0027. The center frequencies of two passbands are set
to and . Substituting and into
(1), one can obtain the impedance ratio , and then cal-
culate the electrical length using (2). Here and
are chosen as 60 and 20 , respectively. The fractional band-
widths (FBWs) of first and second passbands are
and . According to the above mentioned specifi-
cations of the filter, the element values of the low-pass proto-
type filter [11] are , ,
, and . The coupling coeffi-
cients and external quality factors [11] are calculated as
, , , and
for 1 GHz, and , ,
, and for 2 GHz. The full-wave sim-
ulator Agilent Momentum is used to extract the above design
parameters ( and ) [11].
IV. SIMULATED AND MEASURED RESULTS
The dimension parameters of the developed filter have
been indicated in Fig. 4(b). The photograph of the devel-
oped filter is shown in Fig. 5(a). It occupies a circuit size
of . The simulated and measured results
are illustrated in Fig. 5(b), and their enlarged views of the
responses are given in Fig. 5(c). As expected, each passband
has a pair of transmission zeros to improve the selectivity.
The return losses in the two passbands are better than 12.6 dB
while the insertion losses are about 2.65 dB and 2.44 dB at the
first and second passbands, respectively. The insertion loss is
mainly contributed from the dielectric and conductor losses.
Although a number of vias are employed to design the net-type
resonator in this letter, the results reveal that it does not lead to
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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 4, APRIL 2010
an increase of insertion loss. In addition, the mid-band rejection
between two passbands is greater than 40 dB from 1.14 GHz
to 1.75 GHz. It is because the open stub in the resonator 1 or
4 individually gives a transmission zero at around 1.5 GHz,
and then the coupling between resonators 1 and 4 makes two
transmission zeros split at 1.33 and 1.55 GHz. Fig. 6 shows
the measured wideband response of the developed filter. The
stopband rejection is better than 20 dB up to 5.6 GHz, namely
5.6 .
V. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a new net-type resonator is designed to simul-
taneously operate at two specified frequencies, and then ap-
plied to implement a dual-band microstrip BPF. The results in
Section IV demonstrate that the net-type resonator can be suc-
cessfully employed to implement a dual-band BPF. Although a
number of vias are adopted in the net-type resonator design, it
does not obviously lead to an additional insertion loss. More-
over, the developed filter has a good mid-band rejection and a
wide stopband suppression.
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