Back-to-back tunable ferroelectric resonator filters on flexible organic substrates

This paper presents the design and the fabrication of two low-loss X-band back-to-back tunable ferroelectric resonator filters on flexible liquid crystal polymer substrates using wire-bonded BST capacitors as analog tuning elements. The back-to-back topology consists of three resonators on both sides of the substrate coupled by apertures in their common ground plane, allowing the overall size of the filter to be reduced. BST varactors made on a sapphire substrate are easily diced and mounted on the polymer substrates to achieve the desired tuning. Both 3-pole tunable filters show a 1-dB bandwidth of 8 to 10%, low insertion loss (3.6 to 1.95 dB for the best one) with bias voltages from 0 to 35 V, a better compactness compared with classical tunable structures (reduced footprint area by 30% for the best filter) and a frequency tuning of about 11 to 13% at 8 GHz. The demonstrated feasibility opens interesting prospects for the fabrication of compact tunable filters with more resonators.