Abstract
AbstractThis paper studies the corona discharge power thresholds in microstrip bandpass filters (BPFs) and, in particular, is focused on a solution based on λ/2 cover-ended resonators to enhance their peak power handling capability (PPHC). First, a parametric analysis is carried out to evaluate the variation of the maximum electric field and the unloaded quality factor (Qu) as a function of the cover's geometrical dimensions (i.e. height, length, and width). Next, several microstrip BPFs centered at 1.6 GHz are designed, and their behaviors under moderate-to-high applied RF power signals are simulated to corroborate the previous study. A suitable number and size of covers are selected to enhance PPHC without barely degrading the filters’ electrical performance and, consequently, without hardly increasing the insertion losses. Finally, two third-order filters with covers and without covers (benchmark prototype) are manufactured, by way of illustration, and they are tested in the European High-Power RF Space Laboratory to validate the good performance of the proposed solution, where a PPHC enhancement of 3.1 dB at high pressures is achieved as compared to the benchmark prototype.
Highlights
Filters are broadly used at microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies as a fundamental component in RF front-ends of wireless communication systems
Different methods to obtain the unloaded quality factor can be found in the literature, we focused our study on the transmission method presented in [17], applied to an under-coupled fed resonator, and where the Qu is defined as f0/BW−3 dB 1 − |S21(f0)|
A pulsed signal with the common measured carrier frequency at 1.58 GHz, low width (20 μs), and low duty cycle (2%) has been used in order to avoid any self-heating effect in the devices under test (DUT)
Summary
Filters are broadly used at microwave and millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies as a fundamental component in RF front-ends of wireless communication systems. Their use is to allow the transmission of signals of a certain desired pass-band with very little attenuation and rejecting other undesired frequencies. In planar technology, corona RF breakdown has been focused on the connector of a microstrip transmission line [10,11,12] and, more recently, the PPHC and maximum voltage peak at the open-circuit terminations in microstrip filters have been analyzed in [13, 14]
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