Fully reconfigurable microstrip bandpass filter with tunable equivalent impedance and six transmission zeros

In this paper, a reconfigurable filter is designed by adjusting the microstrip line impedance for the first time, which breaks the single situation that the resonator can only adjust the electrical length in the previous microstrip reconfigurable circuits. This fully reconfigurable filter loads varactors between three parallel coupling lines to realize the reconfiguration of equivalent impedance. Changing the equivalent impedance of the resonator can use harmonics to introduce transmission poles (TPs) and transmission zeros (TZs), which not only effectively improves the selectivity of the filter but also greatly improves the stopband suppression. Finally, this fully reconfigurable filter can not only tune the center frequency but also the bandwidth. A total of six TZs are introduced, three can be generated by the resonator itself, and the other three are introduced by loading adjustable stubs. The final size of this filter is 0.34 lambda(g) x 0.25 lambda(g). The measured results are in good agreement with the simulation results.