The Effect of Self-Heating on the Performance of a Tunable Filter With Embedded Windings in a Ferrite LTCC Package

Traditionally, ferrite-based tunable filters are biased by large and bulky electromagnets, which require high currents to overcome the dissipated fields at the air interface between the electromagnet and the ferrite substrate. This problem has been solved by implementing the windings inside the package using ferrite low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC). However, these embedded windings, which are densely packed, generate heat that affects the characteristics of the ferrite material. In this paper, we investigated the heat effects due to embedded windings in ferrite LTCC filters. We also incorporated the heating effects into an electromagnetic simulation model and achieved a good agreement between the simulations and the measurements. We found that increasing the temperature of the filter module from 0 °C to 190 °C by external heating causes the center frequency of the filter to shift by about 1 GHz. Alternatively, when a dc current is passed through the bias windings, heat is generated in the windings to a temperature of 250 °C measured at 260 mA of current. This heat causes the tunability of the filter to increase by more than 2%.