Microstrip Quasi-Elliptic Absorptive Bandpass Filter with Ultra-Wide Reflectionless Range and Compact Size

Absorptive bandpass filters (ABPFs) are highly attractive in modern microwave communication systems due to their ability to internally absorb the harmful stopband RF-power reflections. This paper reports an approach to designing quasi-elliptic ABPFs with ultra-wide reflectionless range, enhanced selectivity, and compact size. The method is realized based on a fourth-order quasi-elliptic absorptive lowpass filter (ALPF) prototype with a simplified structure. This ALPF prototype exhibits both good impedance-matching over the whole normalized frequency domain and an adjustable transmission zero close to the passband. By applying an equivalent impedance transformer model, a coupled-line-based ABPF scheme is devised from the ALPF prototype, which eliminates conventional dispersive transmission line inverters, resulting in an ultra-wide reflectionless range and a compact size. Closed-form equations are derived to support the filter synthesis. A 2.45 GHz microstrip ABPF with 30% fractional bandwidth is designed for verification. The measured minimum in-band insertion loss is 0.83 dB and the reflectionless range of return loss better than 10 dB is from DC to 12.88 GHz. Both the upper and lower stopband suppression exceed 20 dB, with the upper stopband extending up to 6.80 GHz. The upper and lower out-of-band roll-off rates are 93.9 and 121.4 dB/GHz, respectively. The overall circuit size is 0.12 lambda g2.