High-Order Balanced Superconducting Filter With High Selectivity, Low Insertion Loss, and Wide Stopband Range For Radio Astronomy

In this paper, a newly shunted-line stepped-impedance resonator (SLSIR) is studied and applied to realize high-order balanced filter design for radio astronomy application. The proposed SLSIR not only has more flexible control of the internal coupling between adjacent units but also provides more design freedom for the cascade connection of high-order filter. Then, the operating theory of three kinds of electrically, magnetically, and electromagnetically coupled SLSIR pairs has been discussed and utilized to high-performance filter design. Hence, fourth-order balanced filter using electromagnetically coupled SLSIR pairs is investigated and designed, which exhibits an excellent filtering performance under differential-mode (DM) operation as well as a high common-mode (CM) suppression level. In addition, the production mechanism of DM transmission zero is modeled and analyzed. Based on the analysis above, two dissimilar types of coupled SLSIR pairs with the same fundamental frequency but different harmonics are adopted to design an eighth-order balanced filter. Finally, the high-order balanced filter is fabricated on 0.5-mm-thick MgO wafer with double-sided YBCO thin films. Measured results show that the eighth-order balanced filter operates at 2.53 GHz with the corresponding in-band insertion loss of 0.1 dB. Results well verify the proposed structure with high selectivity, low insertion loss, and wide stopband performances.