Design of compact, broad-stopband lowpass filter using modified stepped impedance hairpin resonators

A compact elliptic function lowpass filter using a stepped impedance hairpin resonator is proposed. The filter has the advantages of compact size, low insertion loss, easy fabrication, a wide stopband, and sharp cutoff frequency response. In order to cause a sharp cutoff frequency response and the wide stopband suppression, a coupled stepped impedance resonator is taken into consideration for the newly proposed lowpass filter. A demonstration filter has been designed, fabricated and tested, and the results agree well with the theory. The size of the filter is less than 0.037 lambdag times 0.093 lambdag, where lambdag is the waveguide length at the cutoff frequency 1.5 GHz, and the 10 dB rejection stopband can be extended to more than 15 GHz. The filter is useful for many microwave system applications.