Design of Dual- and Triple-Passband Filters Using Alternately Cascaded Multiband Resonators

A novel method for designing multiband bandpass filters has been proposed in this paper. Coupling structures with both Chebyshev and quasi-elliptic frequency responses are presented to achieve dual- and triple-band characteristics without a significant increase in circuit size. The design concept is to add some extra coupled resonator sections in a single-circuit filter to increase the degrees of freedom in extracting coupling coefficients of a multiband filter and, therefore, the filter is capable of realizing the specifications of coupling coefficients at all passbands. To verify the presented concept, four experimental examples of filters with a dual-band Chebyshev, triple-band Chebyshev, dual-band quasi-elliptic, and triple-band quasi-elliptic response have been designed and fabricated with microstrip technology. The measured results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.