A covering Ka-band two-way switch filter module using a three-line and anE-plane waveguide band-pass filters

Abstract

A millimeter-wave ultrawideband two-way switch filter module is presented in this article. The switch filter module covers whole Ka-band (26–40 GHz), and is composed of two wideband band-pass filters and two monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) single pole two throw (SP2T) switches. One filter is realized using E-plane iris waveguide band-pass filter, and another is realized by a novel 11-pole three-line microstrip structure band-pass filter. Compared with the traditional three-line filter, the proposed three-line filter not only retains virtues of the traditional three-line filter, but also resolves drawbacks of it, which include discontinuities between adjacent sections, many parameters of design, and no effective matching circuits at input/output ports. The developed switch filter module is fabricated using hybrid integrated technology, which has a size of 51 × 26 × 9.8 mm3, and interconnections between MMICs and microstrip are established by bond wires. The fabricated switch filter module exhibits excellent performances: for two different states, the measured insertion loss and return loss are all better than 7 and 10 dB in each pass-band, respectively. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 25:305–310, 2015.