High-Order Dual-Band Superconducting Bandpass Filter With Controllable Bandwidths and Multitransmission Zeros

Abstract

In this paper, a compact dual-mode hairpin ring resonator (HRR) with two controllable resonances is proposed to design high-order dual-band high-temperature superconducting (HTS) bandpass filters. Its noncoupled dual-mode resonant characteristics and the mechanism for inherent transmission zero (TZ) production are studied. Moreover, a general dual-path coupling scheme is introduced for high-order coupling realization and applied to the third-order and eighth-order dual-band filter design. Also, two coupling structures for the adjacent HRRs with different orientations are proposed to excite TZs between the passbands for high selectivity. Besides, dual-parallel input–output feeding structure is adopted to tune the external quality factors of the dual-mode HRR individually so that the two passband are realized easily using high-order structure. For demonstration, an eighth-order dual-band HTS filter both operating at 1.9 and 2.6 GHz for mobile communications application are designed and analyzed. Compared with the third-order one, the selectivity of the eighth-order filter has at least 4.2 times improvement and five TZs are produced for high band-edge selectivity. Finally, the eighth-order dual-band filter is fabricated on MgO substrate with YBCO thin films. Measured results agree well with the simulations and show the excellent performance with 0.12-dB minimum insertion loss and better than −75-dB rejection level up to 5 GHz. In addition, the nonlinear characteristics of the fabricated HTS filter is observed by experiment, which shows the temperature dependence of filter center frequency performance and microwave insertion loss.