Suspended substrate stripline bandpass filters with source-load coupling structure using lumped and full-wave mixed approach

This paper presents the design of two suspended substrate stripline (SSS) bandpass filters (BPFs), both with a source-load coupling structure embedded to create a transmission zero (TZ) near each side of the passband edges. For the first BPF, the physical circuit layout is proposed first and followed by the establishment of an equivalent LC circuit. The optimization of element values of the LC circuit using a circuit-level simulator leads to quick adjustment of the structural parameters of the physical circuit layout with the aid of a full-wave simulator. For the second BPF, the ingenious equivalent LC circuit modified from that of the first one is proposed for bandwidth enhancement, which is achieved by exciting two extra loaded resonances in the passband. With the element values of the LC circuit optimized, proper reshaping the physical circuit layout from that of the first BPF is easily accomplished. The presented lumped and full-wave mixed approach is very efficient in that the circuit- level simulator is used to the largest extent and the time-consuming full-wave simulator is employed only at the later stage of the design. Experiments are conducted to verify the design of the two SSS BPFs and agreements are observed between the measured and simulated data.