Narrowband Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) tunable bandpass filters at X-band

Abstract

A 3rd-order combline tunable filter with very narrow bandwidth at X-band is implemented utilizing ferroelectric barium strontium titanate (BST) interdigitated varactors. The filter and its varactors are integrated on a ceramic substrate together with a simple resistive biasing circuit. Upon the application of a bias voltage ranging from 0 to 90 V the passband of the filter tuned from 8.127 to 9.973 GHz while maintaining a fractional bandwidth of approximately 4.8-5.9 %. Over the tuning band the passband insertion loss varied from 10.7 dB to 7.5 dB while the return loss was better than 15 dB. The tuning ratio is 23 %.