A novel ultra-compact resonator for Superconducting thin-film filters

This paper proposes a novel thin-film resonator structure, which combines the microstrip resonator and the coplanar resonator to form an integrated resonator. This resonator structure has an extremely compact size, as compared to the thin-film resonator structures from the literature, and its resonant frequency was shown theoretically to be less sensitive to, or even insensitive to, the thickness of the substrate. An eight-pole quasi-elliptic filter based on this novel resonator was designed. The exact filter layout was simulated and optimized by full-wave electromagnetic simulation using IE3D software. The full-wave simulated filter response was in good agreement with the theoretical filter response. A filter was fabricated on a double-sided YBa₂Cu₃O₇ thin film epitaxially grown on a 2-in-diameter MgO wafer. The measured filter response showed a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz and a center frequency of 850.3 MHz at 78 K. The insertion loss at the passband center was 1 dB, corresponding to a filter Q of 28 000. Steep rejection slopes were obtained at the band edges and rejections reached over 70 dB in approximately 300 kHz from the passband edges. No pronounced changes were observed for input power levels between -20-0 dBm, indicating a relatively high power-handling capability of the filter.