High-$Q$ -Factor Tunable Bandpass Filter With Constant Absolute Bandwidth and Wide Tuning Range Based on Coaxial Resonators

Abstract

This paper presents a method for designing low-loss varactor-based tunable bandpass filters (BPFs) with constant absolute bandwidth (CABW) and wide tuning range based on coaxial resonators. The whole structure consists of a metallic cavity and a piece of printed circuit board (PCB). Varactors and their biasing components are mounted on the PCB, which are connected to the coaxial resonators to enable frequency tuning. The coupling control between coaxial resonators and the nonsynchronous tuning of the resonators are utilized to realize the CABW over a wide tuning range. Moreover, transmission zeros are generated near the passband, resulting in high skirt selectivity. For demonstration, a second-order tunable coaxial BPF with a wide tuning range from 698 to 960 MHz (31.5%) is designed and fabricated. Due to the use of high- $Q$ -factor coaxial resonators, the proposed tunable filter realizes low insertion losses ranging from 0.82 to 2.03 dB under a narrowband specification. The 1-dB bandwidth is measured as 35.3 ± 2.7 MHz, showing excellent CABW responses. Moreover, a third-order tunable coaxial BPF is also designed and implemented with enhanced skirt selectivity and out-of-band rejection. Comparison with other reported tunable BPFs is given, where the proposed designs show excellent performance of wide tuning range, CABW, high selectivity, and high tuning speed.