High-$Q$ Tunable Evanescent-Mode Cavity SIW Resonators and Filters With Contactless Tuners

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to widely tune high-quality factor evanescent-mode cavity resonators and filters using contactless tuners. The proposed method resolves multiple challenges facing reliable manufacturing and operation of these filters by avoiding the attachment of the flexible tuner to the cavity and replacing it with capacitive contactless tuners. This paper discusses the design consideration and tradeoffs as well as demonstrates the performance of the proposed concept using the substrate-integrated-waveguide technology. The resonators demonstrate more than octave tuning range (TR), quality factor up to 650, and power handling exceeding 100 W. In addition, the second-order bandpass filters are demonstrated, along with the long-term measurements, showing better than 1.17% frequency error after a 15-h stability test, and less than 1.47% frequency error after a 450 cycles repeatability test over an octave TR from 1.8 to 3.6 GHz.