A Synthesis Method for Dual-Passband Microwave Filters

This paper describes a synthesis method for symmetric dual-passband microwave filters. The proposed method employs frequency transformation techniques for finding the locations of poles and zeros of a desired filter. This method can be used to design dual-passband filters with prescribed passbands and attenuation at stopbands directly without the need for any optimization processes. To validate the procedure a dual-passband stripline filter is designed and fabricated. The stripline dual-passband filter is designed with passbands at 3.90-3.95 and 4.05-4.10 GHz, and 30-dB attenuation at the stopband. This measured results show a good agreement with the theoretical ones. The frequency transformation for symmetric dual-passband filters is also extended to include asymmetric dual-passband responses. This flexible frequency transformation preserves the attenuation characteristics of the low-pass filter prototype. Examples are shown to discuss the flexibility of this transformation.