Cross Coupled Wiggly Line Hairpin Filters with

High Selectivity and Spurious Suppression

Hakan P. Partal
1,2

1
Anaren Microwave, Inc
East Syracuse, NY 13057 USA
2
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244 USA
hpartal@ieee.org

Abstract A low cost and compact microstrip bandpass filter
with high selectivity and suppressed harmonic is introduced in
this paper. A simple hairpin resonators filter is manipulated to
obtain the desired filter performance. Line widths of the
resonators are perturbated to adjust odd mode phase velocities
in order to lower the higher order modes. Furthermore, by
implementing a proper cross coupling from input or output to
nonadjacent coupled sections, virtually a quintuplet coupling
scheme is realized to improve the filter selectivity. Then the final
improved hairpin filter has a sharp cut-off, a low spurious level,
and still has the same compact size. The proposed combined
technique is very attractive for variety of miniature filter
applications. A sample filter is designed for this purpose and it
can be adopted in variety of wireless subassemblies including low
power radio carriers, mobile communications, and WIMAX
applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Planar filters are widely used in RF and microwave
applications for their advantages in cost, size, manufacturing
easiness, and adaptability to variety of microwave assemblies.
Microstrip coupled line bandpass filters carry most of these
advantages. However, because of the asymmetric dielectric
mediums above and below the transmission lines, the odd
mode and even mode phase velocity differences result in
additional spurious pass band at even multiples of the main
band.
Edge coupled line filters become compact in size when
their resonators are folded. However, the spurious pass region
becomes closer to the main band and the filters selectivity
becomes degraded. Some techniques are already reported in
literature to eliminate the harmonics of a coupled line filter [1],
[2], and [3]. One of the effective techniques employs wiggly
lines to increase the path for the odd mode phase without
altering the pass region much. There are also techniques to
improve the selectivity by adding cross coupled sections [4]
and [5]. Cross coupling can be realized in most type of
microwave filters and a direct synthesis of cross coupled
filters is published by Levy [6].
This paper introduces a combined technique by utilizing the
two techniques explained above. Initially an edge coupled line
filter is designed and its resonators are folded for compactness.
The first resonator section is replaced by tapped input lines
that decreased the overall size further. This also eliminates
narrowly spaced first coupled line section which makes
etching easier. Then continuous line width perturbations are
applied to eliminate the first harmonic of the filter. Once this
is achieved, a high impedance cross coupled strip from the
source or load to the center hairpin resonator is extended in
order to add a transmission zero around the pass region. The
resulting filter that is proposed is very attractive for its
miniature size and high performance. The filter development
phases are shown in Fig. 1.

(a)


(b)


(c)
Fig. 1. New filter development phases: (a) Typical hairpin resonator filter, (b)
Wiggly line hairpin resonator filter, (c) Cross coupled wiggly line hairpin
resonator filter.
28-30 September 2010, Paris, France
Proceedings of the 40th European Microwave Conference
978-2-87487-016-3 2010 EuMA 1265
II. FILTER DESIGN
Coupled line filter manipulations are explained step by step
to present the improvements achieved. First, a microstrip
parallel coupled line bandpass filter of fifth order is designed
and simulated using Agilent Genesys software, 2.4GHz to
2.7GHz, [7]. 30 mil duroid/RT substrate of dielectric constant
2.2 is used to build the microstrip transmission lines.
Since parallel coupled lines occupy large space, the
resonators can be fold as shown in Fig. 1a, without any
significant impact on filter response as seen in simulation
results of Fig. 2a. It is seen that the microstrip parallel coupled
line filter has pass band re-entrance at about two times the
center frequency. Furthermore, folding the resonators
degrades the ideal parallel coupled line filter response. The
resultant filter is compact; however second harmonic becomes
closer to the main pass band region and selectivity is not as
good.


(a)

0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00
Freq [GHz]
-65.00
-60.00
-55.00
-50.00
-45.00
-40.00
-35.00
-30.00
-25.00
-20.00
-15.00
-10.00
-5.00
0.00
d
B
(
S
(
P
o
r
t
A
,
P
o
r
t
B
)
)

(b)

Fig. 2. Coupled line bandpass filters: (a) Parallel coupled lines
simulated in AWR (b) Optimized folded coupled line (hairpin) filter
simulated in Ansoft HFSS.


An optimization is attempted to reduce the harmonic level
as seen in Fig. 2b. However, due to nature of plain microstrip
hairpin filter, the spurious behaviour remains. Then, a filter
modification will be studied here to improve the selectivity
and reduce the second harmonic level in next section.

III. BAND PASS FILTER WITH HARMONIC REJECTION
AND HIGH SELECTIVITY
The hairpin resonators in Fig. 1a can be modified by
applying continuous linewidth perturbations following a
sinusoidal law. This will adjust the odd mode phase velocity
compared to the even mode one. Detailed line perturbation
analysis can be found in [1]. Then, a new hairpin resonator
with wiggly lines of Fig. 1b is generated and simulation
results are shown in Fig 3.
Based on simulations, the wiggly line filter successfully
reduced the spurious harmonic level down to -34dB. Although
no significant degradation in the pass region is observed, the
filter in Fig. 3 can easily be optimized to fine tune the filter
matching in order to reduce the ripples in the main band.


0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00
Freq [GHz]
-65.00
-60.00
-55.00
-50.00
-45.00
-40.00
-35.00
-30.00
-25.00
-20.00
-15.00
-10.00
-5.00
0.00
d
B
(
S
(
P
o
r
t
A
,
P
o
r
t
B
)
)

Fig. 3. The wiggly line filters simulated response in Ansoft HFSS.


The next step would be improving the filters selectivity. A
usual method for sharp band-stop response is using dielectric
resonators as in [8]. However, if relatively moderate Q is
sufficient, a cost effective solution by adding a cross coupling
strip can be introduced. Synthesis and analysis techniques of
cross coupling can partly be found in [4], [5], and [6]. Cross
coupling line is extended from source or load resonator end
through the central sections cavity as seen in Fig. 1c.
This scheme virtually becomes a quintuplet coupling. The
cross coupling strip can be designed to have a transmission
zero on lower and/or upper edge of the pass band. The strip
length is designed 180 degrees long at the frequency of
interest. The additional transmission zero next to the pass
region provides a sharp cut-off without hurting the pass band
region as seen in Fig 4.
The final cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter
shown in Fig. 1c can further be optimized to improve the
return loss that would reduce the ripples in the pass band
region. It would also be possible to improve the stop band
region by minor optimization or tuning.
1266

0.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 6.00 7.00 8.00
Freq [GHz]
-65.00
-60.00
-55.00
-50.00
-45.00
-40.00
-35.00
-30.00
-25.00
-20.00
-15.00
-10.00
-5.00
0.00
d
B
(
S
(
P
o
r
t
A
,
P
o
r
t
B
)
)


Fig. 4. Cross coupled wiggly line band pass filter with low spurious and
high selectivity simulated in Ansoft HFSS.

IV. FILTER MANUFACTURING AND MEASUREMENTS
The microstrip filters were built using an LPKF milling
machine and the assembled boards are shown in Fig. 5. Note
that the filter dimensions can be obtained by using the
drawing given in Appendix. In that drawing, the final filter is
shown with grid background and dimensions can be obtained
by scaling the picture in AutoCAD.



Fig. 5. Three manufactured filters: Plain hairpin resonator filter (left), wiggly
line hairpin resonator filter (center), and cross coupled wiggly line hairpin
resonator filter (right).

The filters were measured by locating them in a proper
metallic enclosure to provide sufficient grounding and control
the radiation leakages and overall performance. The
measurement results (imported s2p data files from a network
analyzer) are shown in Fig. 6. It is seen that the measured
results agree with the simulations (Figs. 24) very well. Based
on measured results, the following comments are derived:


Frequency (GHz)
s
1
2

(
d
B
)
-65
-60
-55
-50
-45
-40
-35
-30
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
Frequency (GHz)
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 8

(a)

Frequency (GHz)
s
1
2

(
d
B
)
-65
-60
-55
-50
-45
-40
-35
-30
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
Frequency (GHz)
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 8

(b)

Frequency (GHz)
s
1
2

(
d
B
)
-65
-60
-55
-50
-45
-40
-35
-30
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
Frequency (GHz)
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 8

(c)

Fig. 6. Measurement results of the developed filters shown in Fig 5: (a) Plain
hairpin resonator filter, (b) wiggly line hairpin resonator filter, and (c) cross
coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter.
1267
Frequency (GHz)
g
g
(
)
-30
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
Frequency (GHz)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fig. 7. Measured return loss of wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (solid line)
and cross coupled wiggly line hairpin resonator filter (dashed line).

(a) Plain hairpin resonator filter has about 1dB insertion
loss and low reflection in 2.4 to 2.7GHz band.
However out-of-band behaviour on high end is not
preferable because of high spurs at every multiple of
the center frequency. The optimizations can only
reduce the second harmonic down to -18dB.
(b) Wiggly line hairpin resonators significantly reduce
the second harmonic by at least 17 dB at around
5GHz without hurting the pass band performance
much. Only a few small ripples due to some
additional return loss (Fig. 7) were observed in the
pass region. When return loss is tuned the ripple
magnitude would be lower. On the other hand, the
bandwidth becomes wider by about 100MHz, from
2.35 to 2.75GHz.
(c) The high impedance cross coupled line of one
wavelength adds a transmission zero at the band edge.
This provides a very sharp cut-off without noticeable
in-band degradation. The same small ripples
explained in (b) were maintained in band from 2.35
to 2.75GHz. By employing the cross coupled line
along with wiggly resonators, a high performance
filter with high selectivity and reduced second
harmonic is obtained. As seen in Fig 6c, the second
harmonic has been reduced by at least 12 dB.
(d) A trade off with sharp cut-off and magnitude of
spurious rejection can be pronounced. However, it
has been observed that harmonic rejection is only
degraded by about 5 dB with the cross coupled line.
(e) The new cross coupled wiggly line hairpin filter is
tunable and, further return loss improvement for
lower ripples in band is possible.
(f) If extremely high Q-factor is not needed, cross
coupled lines can be used in place of dielectric
resonators as they do not increase size and cost.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A new high performance microstrip bandpass filter is
proposed. The technique applies to miniature hairpin resonator
filters by perturbating resonator line widths and adding a
proper cross coupling strip from the source/load to a resonator
section. The final filter is compact size with low spurious and
sharp cut-off response. It is a cost effective solution for high
performance filter applications.
APPENDIX
Filter dimensions can be obtained by using the drawing
given below. The microstrip filter of Fig. 1c is displayed with
a grid background and dimensions can be obtained by scaling
the picture in AutoCAD. Here, each grid is 0.1 inch square
and line width of the cross coupled line is 8 mils.


Scalable filter drawing with grid background.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank his colleagues, Chong Mei and
Luke Murphy for their support on this paper.
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