Capacitive-Ended Interdigital Coupled Lines for UWB Bandpass Filters With Improved Out-of-Band Performances

This letter presents a novel ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip bandpass filter on a microstrip line with improved out-of-band performances. A multiple-mode resonator (MMR) is first constituted to equally allocate its first three resonant frequencies in the 3.1-10.6-GHz UWB band. Two capacitive-ended interdigital coupled lines are then formed to assign their transmission zero towards the fourth-order resonant frequency of this MMR, thereby suppressing the first spurious passband. Moreover, two outer arms in the interdigital lines are properly tapered to compensate the phase imbalance or group delay near the UWB upper-end relying on extra capacitive-ended stubs. And finally, two UWB filters with one- and two-MMRs are designed and implemented to experimentally demonstrate the improved out-of-band performances, i.e., widened/deepened upper-stopband and sharpened rejection skirts outside the UWB passband