Micromachined Filters at 450 GHz With 1% Fractional Bandwidth and Unloaded <italic>Q</italic> Beyond 700

Abstract

This letter presents two silicon-micromachined narrowband fourth-order waveguide filter concepts with center frequency of 450 GHz, which are the first narrowband submillimeter-wave filters implemented in any technology with a fractional bandwidth as low as 1%. Both filters designs are highly compact and have axial port arrangements, so that they can be mounted directly between two standard waveguide flanges without needing any split-block interposers. The first filter concept contains two TM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">110</sub> dual-mode cavities of circular shape with coupling slots and perturbations arranged in two vertically stacked layers, while the second filter concept is composed of four TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">101</sub> series resonators arranged in a folded, two-level topology without crosscouplings. Prototype devices are fabricated in a multilayer chip platform by high-precision, low-surface roughness deep-silicon etching on silicon-on-insulator wafers. The measured passband insertion loss of two prototype devices of the dual-mode circular-cavity filters is 2.3 dB, and 2.6 dB for three prototypes of the folded filter design. The corresponding extracted unloaded quality factors of the resonators are 786 ± 7 and 703 ± 13, respectively, which are the best so far reported for submillimeter-wave filters in any technology. The presented filters are extremely compact in terms of size; their footprints have areas of only 0.53 and 0.55 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , respectively, and the thickness between the waveguide flanges is 0.9 mm.