Design of Compact Lowpass Filter with Ultra-Wide Stopband Using Thin Slots

This paper presents a compact microstrip stepped-impedance lowpass filter with ultra-wide stopband by using back-to-back C-shaped and triple C-shaped thin slots. The properties of several thin slots in the ground plane have been investigated in this paper. With the full-wave simulation results and a simplified equivalent model, the total equivalent inductance of the thin slots can be extracted at cutoff frequency for lowpass filter design purpose. On the other hand, the thin slots work as bandstop filter at the stopband of the lowpass filter for a better stopband rejection. The proposed lowpass filter with a cutoff frequency of 2 GHz shows a wide stopband with an over 25-dB attenuation up to 17.5 GHz. From dc to 2 GHz, the insertion loss is less than 0.3 dB and the return loss is greater than 20 dB. In comparison to the conventional stepped-impedance lowpass filter with the same passband performance, the proposed lowpass filter shows not only a 24.3% size reduction but also a better stopband rejection.