Microwave On-Chip Bandpass Filter Based on Hybrid Coupling Technique

Abstract

In this paper, a novel on-chip circuit design approach is proposed using hybrid coupling technique. Taking advantage of this technique, a microwave bandpass filter (BPF) is proposed as a design example for proof of concept. Based on stub-loaded stepped-impedance transmission lines and folded stepped-impedance meander line from different metal layers, the proposed BPF can generate three transmission zeros (TZs) and two transmission poles (TPs), which are excited through the hybrid mutual couplings between the inductive and capacitive metals. To understand the principle of this configuration, an equivalent LC-circuit model is presented and simplified, of which the TZs and TPs of the proposed BPF are estimated by the extracted transfer function. The calculated results exhibit good agreements with the simulated and measured ones. In addition, the bandwidth and center frequency of the proposed BPF can be tuned flexibly. Finally, to further demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in practice, the structure is implemented and fabricated in a commercial 0.13- $\mu \text{m}$ SiGe (Bi)-CMOS technology. The measurement results show that the proposed BPF, whose chip size is 0.39 mm $\times0.45$ mm (excluding the test pads), can realize a wide bandwidth from 19.7 to 33.2 GHz with a return loss of 15.8 dB and insertion loss of 3.8 dB at the center frequency of 26.5 GHz.