Dimensional synthesis for wide-band waveguide filters and diplexers

Broad-band waveguide filter and diplexer designs are widely used for telecommunications, space, and terrestrial applications. Fairly accurate design procedures giving equivalent-circuit information are well known for bandpass filters, but this data needs to be converted into physical dimensions, i.e., waveguide cavity lengths and iris dimensions. A novel procedure giving dimensions of bandpass filters directly for wide- and narrow-band applications is described. Iris network models are generated with the aid of electromagnetic simulators and used to derive correct iris dimensions and accurate susceptance slope parameters of the cavities, avoiding global optimization of the entire structure. The results demonstrate very good equiripple performance up to bandwidths of approximately 20% in frequency or 40% in terms of guide wavelength. A similar dimensional synthesis to design waveguide noncontiguous bandpass diplexers is also given. The method uses a fast and efficient optimization with a reduced number of variables, which is fixed and independent of the order of the two filters. The simplicity of the method leads to good return-loss levels and the derivation of the diplexer dimensions takes less than 10 min, including optimization.