A 1.2–1.6-GHz Substrate-Integrated-Waveguide RF MEMS Tunable Filter

This paper presents a high-performance substrate-integrated-waveguide RF microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) tunable filter for 1.2–1.6-GHz frequency range. The proposed filter is developed using packaged RF MEMS switches and utilizes a two-layer structure that effectively isolates the cavity filter from the RF MEMS switch circuitry. The two-pole filter implemented on RT/Duroid 6010LM exhibits an insertion loss of 2.2–4.1 dB and a return loss better than 15 dB for all tuning states. The relative bandwidth of the filter is 3.7
$\pm$
0.5% over the tuning range. The measured
$Q_{u}$
of the filter is 93–132 over the tuning range, which is the best reported
$Q$
in filters using off-the-shelf RF MEMS switches on conventional printed circuit board substrates. In addition, an upper stopband rejection better than 28 dB is obtained up to 4.0 GHz by employing low-pass filters at the bandpass filter terminals at the cost of 0.7–1.0-dB increase in the insertion loss.