High Aspect-Ratio Coplanar Waveguide Wideband Bandpass Filter With Compact Unit Cells

This paper introduces a micromachined thick single-metal-layer high aspect-ratio coplanar waveguide (CPW) wideband bandpass filter with compact unit cells based on the electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) concept. The filter is miniaturized as a result of using the EBG concept in design, and also by realizing high aspect-ratio structures with polymer-based deep X-ray lithography fabrication. Cascaded unit cells in the EBG model consist of capacitive and inductive parallel periodically loaded transmission lines, which determine the filter bandwidth. Compact unit cells are realized by using high aspect-ratio CPW stepped-impedance resonators. The main advantage of this approach is that the high aspect-ratio CPW structures make short unit cells practically realizable, resulting in a compact filter structure. A bandpass filter with 47% bandwidth is designed and fabricated using deep X-ray lithography, and the performance and physical size is compared to a conventional quarter-wavelength-based admittance inverter filter.