Dual Mode Suspended Substrate Stripline (SSS) Filter

Evolution of wireless communication systems towards high flexibility, low cost and high efficiency leads to tremendous activity in the area of microwave filters. In an RF front-end of a cellular radio base station, signals are being transmitted and received simultaneously. In the receive band, there are chances of intermodulation products from the power amplifier being fed to the receiver,thus the transmit filter must have a very high level of signal rejection. Furthermore, the transmit filter must also have low passband insertion loss since it impacts the power transmitted and the overall transmit system efficiency. Recently, filters with dual-mode operation were being investigated due to their ability to produce two degenerate modes using a single physical structure; therefore, the size and cost of the filter can be reduced without compromising any figure-of-merits. A dual mode suspended substrate stripline filter is presented in this thesis. These filters enable achieving low insertion loss, high Q, high selectivity and good spurious response. Initially, a dual mode ring resonator structure is investigated using suspended substrate stripline technology. This technology is used due to its advantages which are comparable to microstrip or any other planar transmission lines. The HFSS three dimensional finite element method (FEM) is used to evaluate the resonant frequency, quality factor and the first harmonics.A second order suspended substrate stripline filter was designed with capacitive coupled input and output feeding method. The input and output feed were positioned 90 degree from each other while a notch was used in this filter to couple two degenerate modes which also control the bandwidth of the filter. A high performance Generalized Chebychev filter was designed to meet the stringent electrical requirement in the RF front-end of a cellular radio base station. With this fourth order filter, four finite frequency transmission zeros were achieved due to phase cancellation between two paths which results in high selectivity filter response. Metal tuning screws were added to improve any practical imperfections. Finally an asymmetrical Generalized Chebychev filter was designed with real frequency transmission zeros positioned on one side of the passband. With this design, the aim of achieving higher selectivity filter response above the passband was demonstrated.