A Broadband Single-Stage Equivalent Circuit for Modeling LTCC Bandpass Filters

A single-stage equivalent circuit is proposed to model microwave bandpass filters (BPFs) fabricated in low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology up to several times its passband frequency. The equivalent circuit adopts a modified T topology with the expandable multilayer resonators to achieve an extremely large bandwidth. It can be efficiently established from the measured S-parameters using direct extraction or rational approximation. As a result, the modeled S-parameters for a 2.45-GHz wideband local area network (WLAN) LTCC BPF show good agreement with the measured results over a wide frequency range up to 8.5 GHz. Such a broadband model can be used to accurately predict the suppression of harmonics and interferences in system simulation of the WLAN front-end modules