Design of a Ka-Band U-Shaped Bandpass Filter with 20-GHz Bandwidth in 0.13-mu m BiCMOS Technology

In this work, the design of a novel Ka-band miniaturized bandpass filter with broad bandwidth is demonstrated by using inversely coupled U-shaped transmission lines. In the proposed filter, two transmission zeros can be generated within a cascaded U-shaped structure and it can also be proven that, by inversely coupling two stacked U-shaped transmission lines, the notch frequency at the upper stopband can be shifted to a lower frequency, which results in a smaller chip size. The key parameters affecting the performance of the proposed filter are investigated in detail with the effective lumped-element circuit illustrated. Fabricated in a 0.13-mu m SiGe BiCMOS process, the proposed filter achieves an insertion loss of 3.6 dB at a frequency of 28.75 GHz and the measured bandwidth is from 20.75 GHz to 41 GHz. The return loss is better than -10 dB from 20.5 GHz to 39 GHz. The lower transmission zero is located at 11.75 GHz with a suppression of 54 dB while the upper transmission zero is around 67 GHz with an attenuation of 34.6 dB. The measurement agrees very well with the simulation results and the overall chip size of the proposed filter is 176 x 269 mu m(2).