High- Tc superconducting tunable filter with steep attenuation

Abstract

We developed a compact RF receiver front-end subsystem using a high- T c superconducting sharp-skirt band-pass filter with a center frequency tuning function. The subsystem had two pairs of the tunable filter and an LNA on board. A 23-pole hairpin-type 2-GHz microstrip-line filter was fabricated with YBa 2Cu 3O y thin films deposited on a 35-mm-wide and 70-mm-long sapphire substrate. Attenuation characteristics were more than 40 dB at 1 MHz, apart from both the lower and the higher pass-band edges. For center frequency tuning, a 1-mm-thick dielectric sapphire plate was stacked on the filter, and the filtering characteristics were tuned by moving the plate using a piezoelectric bending actuator. The range of the center frequency modulation was more than 10 MHz with no significant degradation of the low-loss and sharp-skirt characteristics.