Application of electromagnetic bandgaps to the design of ultra-wide bandpass filters with good out-of-band performance

In this study, a new technique for the design of ultrawide bandpass filters with spurious suppression over a very wide band is presented. The method consists on the combination of a well-known analytical design approach to achieve wide bandwidths with an electromagnetic bandgap structure, which is fundamental for spurious suppression. To illustrate the technique, a microstrip of ultra-wide bandpass filter centered at 3.4 GHz with a bandwidth covering 4.8 GHz is implemented in an Arlon substrate (permittivity epsilon(r) = 2.4, thickness h = 0.675 mm). Measured filter characteristics are good with in-band insertion losses below 0.90 dB and return losses better than 10 dB. Out-of-band performance is also good with spurious passband attenuation higher than 30 dB up to at least 20 GHz.