Compact planar and vialess composite low-pass filters using folded stepped-impedance resonator on liquid-Crystal-polymer substrate

A compact composite low-pass filter, designed by the image parameter method and semilumped component approach, will be described and results for cutoff frequency ranging from C- to V-band will be presented. This composite design combines four filter sections and the presence of a strong attenuation pole near the cutoff frequency provides an extremely sharp attenuation response, while ensuring good matching properties in the passband, making this filter design very attractive for harmonic spurious response suppression or diplexing. The lumped-element schematic of the filter has been implemented using a combination of a stepped-impedance filter and folded stepped-impedance resonators. The overall folded layout has been optimized using full-wave simulation and occupies an ultra-compact area of only 5×5 mm² for a C-band filter. Measured results exhibit rejection of the attenuated pole greater than 40 dB. Similar filter designs have been realized for C- and V-bands. These filters have been fabricated on a liquid-crystal-polymer substrate demonstrating a high performance, ultra-compact, and very low-cost solution for RF and millimeter-wave applications.