Highly loaded evanescent cavities for widely tunable high-Q filters

In the present work, a widely tunable high-Q air filled evanescent cavity bandpass filter is created in an LTCC substrate. A low loss Rogers Duroid(R) flexible substrate forms the top of the filter, acting as a membrane for a tunable parasitic capacitor that allows variable frequency loading. A commercially available piezoelectric actuator is mounted on the Duroid(R) substrate for precise electrical tuning of the filter center frequency. The filter is tuned from 2.71 to 4.03 GHz with insertion losses ranging from 1.3 to 2.4 dB across the range for a 2.5% bandwidth filter. Secondarily, an exceptionally narrow band filter is fabricated to show the potential for using the actuators to fine tune the response to compensate for fabrication tolerances. While most traditional machining techniques would not allow for such narrow band filtering, the high-Q and the sensitive tuning combine to allow for near channel selection for a front-end receiver. For further analysis, a widely tunable resonator is also created with a 100% tunable frequency range, from 2.3 to 4.6 GHz. The resonator analysis gives unloaded quality factors ranging from 360 to 700 with a maximum frequency loading of 89%. This technique shows a lot of promise for tunable RF filtering applications.