Proceedings of Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference 2006

A New Compact Capacitive-Gap-Coupled Microstrip

Bandpass Filter Using Arrowhead Shape As Defected
Ground Structure (DGS)
A. Boutejdar, A. Elsherbiny* and A. S. Omar

Chair of Microwave and Communication Engineering, University of Magdeburg,

Germany Phone: +493916720093, E-mail: [Link]@[Link]
*
Department of Communication Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract — This letter reports a new design of In many bandpass filters, defected ground
compact end-coupled microstrip Bandpass filter with structures are introduced to improve their
two arrowhead slots as defected ground structure performance and realize compact size. A DGS in a
(DGS) in the ground plane [1]-[3]. These slots ground plane, excited by the microstrip line works
replaced two λ/2-microstrip resonators. Both feeds as an evanescent mode waveguide section.
are indirectly coupled with the resonator on top layer
by means of a J12-admittance inverter (gap g). This
Combined with the coupling capacitor between the
method gives an advantage of size reduction over the microstrip and the slot, the DGS produces a band-
conventional design by more than 50%, this reject resonance. The DGS slot is modeled by a
structure allows for a convenient method to control parallel LC resonant circuit.
the center-frequency and high suppression of In this paper, design method of reducing the size
harmonics. From 6 to 16GHz, the investigated DGS- of microstrip end-coupled filter with resonant
BPF has a rejection level better than 20dB. elements in the ground plane is presented. 50% of
According to design and measurement results, a good size reduction of the proposed filter is due to the
agreement between simulated and measured results replace of top-resonators through DGS-resonators.
is achieved.
The use of DGS-procedure allows obtaining a new
Index Terms— End-coupled BPF, Λ/2-microstrip
DGS end-coupled BPF with good characteristics
resonators, DGS-BPF, arrowhead slots resonators.
such as a wide stopband and good rejection in
stopband. In addition, easy design and fabrication
I. INTRODUCTION are other advantages as compared with the
In recent years, the demand for compact conventional end-coupled BPF.
microstrip bandpass filters is increasing due to the
recently expanding microwave and mobile II. CLASSIC END-COUPLED BPF STRUCTURE
communication systems. So far, a few effective
techniques [1], have been successfully developed
to miniaturize the filter size and suppress the
Fig. 1 shows three end-coupled λ/2-microstrip
spurious harmonic passband without increasing the
resonators. They are located between two 50Ω
number of periodic structures. The narrow
feeds. A gap of width g separates the resonators.
bandpass filters are of key importance for the radio
This gap corresponds to a J-inverter in the
frequency engineer, since they are currently used
equivalent circuit [2].
in communication application to reject spurious
signal, and to separate different channels in
multichannel communication system. Additionally,
the performance of compact design, low insertion
loss in the passband, and sharpness in transition
domain are necessary to meet the requirements.
Much effort has been made to develop a variety of w λ/2
compact microstrip bandpass filters. Recently a
type of newly developed microstrip filter was
realized by using defected ground structure g1
resonators. Defected ground structures (DGS) have
become one of the most interesting areas of g2
research owing to their extensive applicability in
microwave circuit. DGS has also been used to
improve the stopband characteristics of a LPF. Fig. 1. The end-coupled BPF.

Copyright 2006 IEICE

 g III. THE PROPOSED Л-ARROWHEAD SLOT AND ITS
FREQUENCY CHARACTERISTICS
h h
Lp Cp Fig.6 shows three different DGS resonators [3].
єr Each resonator is etched in the metallic ground
plane and is separated from 50Ω microstrip line on
the top layer through a dielectric substrate with εr=
3.38 and thickness h=0.813mm. Each DGS consist
Ck of two heads, which are connected with one etched
line. The head corresponds to an equivalent
inductance and the etched line corresponds to an
-CIO -CIO equivalent capacitance [4]-[5] .

Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit of end-coupled BPF. a

F h y

l
YR
J34
J23
J01

J12

YR YR
x
g
Fig. 3. Equivalent circuit with J-inverter. Fig. 6. Three several DGS slots.

The effect of the gap separation (g) was examined.

The width of the connecting etched line in the
DGS-cell was made equal to g. The head area and
the other dimensions of DGS-cell are kept constant
as shown in Fig. 9. In the second step the head area
was varied and the gap was kept constant. The
modification of arrowhead-area is examined in x-
Fig. 4. Fabricated end-coupled BPF (conventional). direction and in y-direction [6].

0
0

-10
-10
S11
-20
-20 S12
-30
S11
S12 & S11[dB]

S12 & S11[dB]

-40 -30

-50
-40

-60

-50 h=4.4mm
-70
S12 Measurement/Simulation h=5mm
Equivalent circuit h=5.4mm
-80 -60
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Frequency[GHz] Frequency[GHz]

Fig. 5. Comparison between measured- results of Fig. 7. Simulated S-parameters for different length h.
conventional BPF.

The variations of the gap width and of the

Fig.5 shows the agreement between the equivalent arrowhead area in x-direction have only small
circuit and the EM simulation in stopband. influence on the center frequency position as
However, a clear disagreement appears in shown in Fig. 8. On the other hand, the variations
passband. This is caused from dispersion of have a big influence on arrowhead in y-direction,
discontinuities of resonators. In order to eliminate thus the position the center frequency is simply
this loss in passband; DGS shapes will be used controlled through the slots' length, as is shown in
instead of microstrip resonators. Fig. 7.
 0

-10

-20
S11 q
S12 & S11[dB]

-30

-40

S12
-50 a=5mm
a=5.4mm
a=6mm
-60 Fig. 11. Fabricated proposed DGS BPF with metallic box.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Frequency[GHz]

Fig. 8. Simulated S-parameters for different headwidth a.

0
VI. COMPACT END-COUPLED BPF USING DGS-
SLOTS
-10
S11 In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
-20
S11 planar arrowhead slot, we compared the proposed
DGS-bandpass filter with the conventional end-
S12 & S11[dB]

-30 coupled BPF. The two filters are designed for the
same center frequency of 5GHz. They were
S12
-40
simulated and fabricated on a substrate with a
dielectric constant of 3.38 and a thickness of
-50 g=0.7mm
g=0.8mm
0.813mm. A compensated microstrip line is
g=0.9mm assumed on the top. For the DGS bandpass filter,
-60
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 the maximum passband ripple was 2.3dB whereas
Frequency[GHz]
5.2dB is obtained in the non-DGS end-coupled
Fig. 9. Simulated S-parameters for different gap g. BPF (Conventional). For the proposed structure, a
wide stopband with more than 20dB attenuation
was obtained, up to 3 times of its center frequency
(nearly 10GHz). On the other hand for the
IV. INFLUENCE OF METALLIC BOX ON S- Conventional filter, the stopband width with 20dB
PARAMETERS attenuation reaches only 4.5Ghz. Moreover the
proposed filter is 50% smaller than the
Microstrip filters are used in several microwave conventional end-coupled filter [7]-[8].
and communication systems, such as cell phones The new DGS-bandpass filter [9] was fabricated
and HF-instruments. In such system, the filters are and its measured results are shown in Fig. 14 and
also connected with other components and metallic Fig. 15. The simulation results agree well with the
layers, this is an advantage of DGS-filters, because measurement results. TableI shows the
the strewing losses become small. The characteristics of the both filters.
improvement of losses in passband depends on the
distance q between slot and the upper layer. This
improvement can only be realized in limited
Interval [qmin<3mm , qmax ], as is shown in Fig.10. DGS-Slot
5

p 50Ω-Linie
w
-5 Gap
-10
S 11[dB]

-15

-20

q=35mm
Substrate
q=25mm
-25
q=15mm
q=5mm
q=<3mm
-30
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Frequency[GHz]

Fig. 10. Simulated S-parameters for different distance q . Fig. 12. Three-dimensional view of the proposed DGS BPF.
 TABLE I VII. CONCLUSION
COMPARISON OF CHARACTERISTICS OF DGS-BPF AND
A novel very compact microstrip bandpass filter
END-COUPLED BPF (CONVENTIONAL)
using the defected ground structure slot is
proposed. The DGS bandpass filter was not only of
compact size, but also of lower insertion loss in the
Dimensions/ Slots’
Filter passband and higher rejection in the stopband than
mm dimensions/mm
the conventional end-coupled filter. We have also
g1=0.7, demonstrated the importance of the arrowhead
Conventional
g2=0.1, w=2, a=5, l=10, h=4.4 slots and its influence on the results. We proved
BPF
λ=12
that compact filters with a large reject band can be
realized through the use of the DGS method. In
DGS-BPF d=10, g3=0.6 F=11mm2,g=0.6 order to show the validity of the proposed new
procedure, the bandpass filter have been designed,
fabricated and measured. Numerical simulations
using microwave office show good agreement with
the measurement results.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to thank Mr. Y. [Link]

and Mr. H. Dempewolf, for their cooperation in
(b) (a)
laboratory.
Fig. 13. Photograph of fabricated DGS BPF. (a) Top
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