136 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO.

3, MARCH 2010

Nonuniformly Folded Waveguide Resonators

and Their Filter Applications
Guo-Shu Huang and Chun Hsiung Chen

AbstractNonuniformly folded substrate integrated waveguide

(SIW) resonator is proposed to design compact cavity filters with
narrow to wide bandwidths. By taking advantages of the generated
stepped impedance resonator (SIR), the harmonic resonance fre-
quencies of the proposed resonator may be controlled by properly
adjusting the length and impedance ratio of the resonator. With
the first harmonic moved away from the fundamental, a compact
filter of 5% bandwidth may be realized with better stopband per-
formance than the conventionally unfolded one. Alternatively, by
moving the first harmonic toward the fundamental, one may uti-
lize the first two resonances of two cavities to realize a four-pole
filter with a wide bandwidth of 38.5%.
Index TermsLow-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC),
nonuniformly folded waveguide, stepped impedance resonator
(SIR), substrate integrated waveguide (SIW).

I. INTRODUCTION

ECTANGULAR waveguide structures have advantages Fig. 1. (a) Conventional unfolded waveguide resonator. (b) Uniformly folded

R over planar transmission lines due to the merit of low loss.

However, they are difficult to integrate with the planar circuitry
resonator. (c),(d) Proposed nonuniformly folded waveguide resonator.

because of their 3-D geometry.

in the vertical direction twice, a uniformly folded resonator
Recently, more attention has been paid to the development of
[Fig. 1(b)] is realized, with its resonator length reduced to
substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) circuits, which are made
about one-third of the unfolded one. By keeping the height of
of parallel metallic via arrays in the substrate and can be fabri-
the middle substrate layer different from those of the top and
cated by the standard printed circuit board or the low-temper-
bottom layers, one may achieve a nonuniformly folded SIW
ature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) process. The SIW circuits have
resonator as shown in Fig. 1(c) or (d). Note that a stepped
the merits of low cost and easy integration into microwave and
impedance resonator (SIR) is also realized in Fig. 1(c) or (d),
millimeter wave integrated circuits (MMICs). Compared with
therefore by properly choosing the length and impedance ratio
the microstrip structures, they have higher quality factor and no
of the waveguide SIR, its harmonic resonance frequency can
radiation loss, therefore they are suitable for realizing passive
be controlled to move toward higher or lower frequency. In
components in MMICs. However, their physical sizes are still
the former case, an LTCC filter with 5% bandwidth is imple-
too large when compared with the microstrip circuitry.
mented, occupying a size only one-fourth of and having a better
Up to now, several reduced-size waveguide resonators, using
stopband performance than the conventionally unfolded one.
folded waveguides or half mode waveguides, have been pro-
In the latter case, a four-pole filter with bandwidth of 38.5% is
posed in the literature [1][7]. In [5], the folded half mode SIW,
achieved using only two waveguide cavities.
which occupies one-fourth the size of the conventional one, was
proposed, however, it has the difficulty associated with the ra-
diation issue. II. NONUNIFORMLY FOLDED WAVEGUIDE RESONATOR
In this study, a nonuniformly folded SIW resonator is pro- Fig. 1 shows the proposed nonuniformly folded waveguide
posed. By folding the conventional SIW [Fig. 1(a)] uniformly resonators [Fig. 1(c), (d)] together with the related resonators
[Fig. 1(a), (b)]. Similar to the conventional SIW resonator,
the maximum dominant-mode E-field of the uniformly folded
Manuscript received October 09, 2009; revised November 06, 2009. First
published February 05, 2010; current version published March 10, 2010. This
waveguide resonator is located at the center part of the second
work was supported by the Excellent Research Projects of National Taiwan Uni- layer as shown in Fig. 1(b). For the resonator with ,
versity, NTU-ERP-97R0062-AE00-00. the maximum E-field occurs at the middle of the second layer
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Graduate as shown in Fig. 1(c). For the one with , the maximum
Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei
106, Taiwan (e-mail: chchen@ew.ee.ntu.edu.tw). E-field occurs around the corner regions near the metallic strip
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2010.2040209 edges as shown in Fig. 1(d)[1].
1531-1309/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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HUANG AND CHEN: NONUNIFORMLY FOLDED WAVEGUIDE RESONATORS 137

Fig. 2. Frequency ratio versus impedance ratio and the related section length.

TABLE I
UNLOADED QUALITY FACTORS FOR NONUNIFORMLY
FOLDED WAVEGUIDE RESONATORS (UNIT: MM)

Fig. 3. Proposed narrow-bandwidth filter with K < 1. Unit: mm.

frequency of the proposed waveguide resonator. The dielectric

constant of the substrate is 7.5 at 10 GHz.
The first bandpass filter structure with is shown in
The physical length of each section in Fig. 1(c) or (d) and Fig. 3. The SIW structure is formed by incorporating lines of
the ratio between two impedances with are the metallic via holes on the boundary of the LTCC to form the
two parameters that can be adjusted to control the fundamental desired metallic sidewalls. The proposed filter is composed of
and the first harmonic frequencies of nonuniformly four half-wavelength waveguide resonators. For connection to
folded resonator. Fig. 2 shows the design curves for frequency coplanar waveguide (CPW) input/output ports at both ends of
ratio and related section length in terms of the filter, suitable CPW-to-waveguide transitions are included
impedance ratio , using the technique similar to and directly patterned on the waveguide resonators. The dimen-
[8]. From Fig. 2, it is observed that a wider separation between sions of transitions determine the external quality factor by ad-
the fundamental and the first harmonic will be achieved with a justing the length and width of the slotline ( and ). An induc-
value of ; in this case, the length of the resonator will fur- tive window with an opening ( or ) in the waveguide
ther be reduced when compared with the uniformly folded one. is introduced between neighboring resonators so as to maintain
On the other hand, a value of will result in a lower first the required coupling. The implemented multilayer filter (Fig. 3)
harmonic frequency; in this case, the length of the resonator will is designed based on the specifications of 5% fractional band-
be longer than the uniformly folded one as shown in Fig. 1(d). width centered at 9.75 GHz. The impedance ratio is chosen
By properly choosing the length and impedance ratio of the to be 0.33 here, leading to a frequency ratio of 2.05 which can
nonuniformly folded waveguide resonator, the fundamental and be obtained from Fig. 2. The related geometric parameters (unit:
first harmonic frequencies can be controlled. mm) are: , , , ,
Listed in Table I are the unloaded quality factors for var- , , , and . The lengths of
ious nonuniformly folded waveguide resonators, all having the metal lines and gap lengths between vertical walls and the metal
same height of and using silver metallization lines are properly chosen so that four resonators would resonate
and loss tangent of 0.005 at 10 GHz in simulation. The values at the same center frequency of the filter. Fig. 4 compares the
of and are obtained by the eigenmode solution solver of results for the proposed filter (Fig. 3) with those for the conven-
HFSS. Although the nonuniformly folded resonator with tional fourth-order unfolded one (cavity height of 0.312 mm and
or may have the merit of improving the stopband per- of 136). The measured first harmonic frequency of the
formance or increasing the filter bandwidth, its unloaded quality proposed filter occurs at 19.84 GHz; while GHz for
factor is somewhat degraded when compared with the uniformly the conventional filter. The measured insertion losses of the im-
folded resonator with . plemented filter and conventional one are 4.9 and 4.3 dB around
the center frequency, respectively. The implemented filter has a
size only one quarter of and has a better stopband performance
III. LTCC FILTER DESIGN
than the conventionally unfolded one at the cost of higher inser-
In this study, two filters are fabricated on the multilayer LTCC tion loss.
substrate (16 layers in total with a thickness of 0.832 mm) so To illustrate the possibility of increasing the bandwidth,
as to demonstrate the feasibility of controlling the harmonic the four-pole waveguide filter with is proposed and

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138 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 3, MARCH 2010

Fig. 6. Measured and simulated (HFSS) results for the wide-bandwidth filter
Fig. 4. Measured and simulated (HFSS) results for the narrow-bandwidth filter (Fig. 5).
in Fig. 3, with the measured results for the conventional unfolded one also in-
cluded for comparison.

Fig. 5. Proposed wide-bandwidth filter with
shown in Fig. 5. The filter is composed of two half-wave-
length nonuniformly folded waveguide resonators. The feeding
structure utilizes the CPW-to-waveguide transition, which can
provide necessary coupling by properly adjusting the length
and width of the quarter-wavelength slotline shorted stub
and the feeding length . Besides, an additional
stepped impedance configuration is incorporated for
improving impedance matching in the design. The impedance
ratio is chosen to be 3.33, which leads to a frequency ratio
of 1.22. In this design, both the fundamental and the first
harmonic are utilized to realize the four-pole filter which uses
only two cavities. By proper arrangement of the four resonance
frequencies, a wide-bandwidth filter can be obtained when
compared with the conventional two-cavity filter. The related
geometric parameters (unit: mm) are: , ,
, , , ,
, , and . The width of the
coupling window between two cavities is chosen to be 4.105
mm for impedance matching and bandwidth consideration.
Fig. 6 shows the simulated and measured results of the imple-
mented filter (Fig. 5), which achieves a fractional bandwidth
of 38.5%. The measured insertion loss is 1.08 dB around the
center frequency. With strong coupling between two cavities
, the out-band selectivity is degraded due to the
excitation of higher order modes.
IV. CONCLUSION
Nonuniformly folded SIW resonators have been proposed.
Two filters with different fractional bandwidths, which can be
controlled by adjusting the length and impedance ratio of the
resonators, have been designed, implemented, and measured.
By using the vertically folded waveguide resonator, the size
of the proposed filter can further be reduced in the multilayer
LTCC structure. The fabricated filter with impedance ratio
and frequency ratio possesses the property of
better stopband performance and reduced size (only one-fourth)
when compared with the conventionally folded uniform one.
The second filter with and has com-
K > 1. bined the first two resonances of the waveguide SIR to realize a
four-pole filter of 38.5% bandwidth by applying only two wave-
guide cavities. Finally, measurement and simulation results have
been compared and good agreement between them has been ob-
tained, validating the design concepts associated with the pro-
posed waveguide resonators.
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