Design and fabrication of a microstrip lowpass filter with wide tuning range as harmonic suppression with application in Wilkinson power divider

In this article, a tunable lowpass filter (LPF) with a hexagonal stepped impedance resonator and multi open stubs is designed. The - 3 dB cut-off frequency for the proposed LPF is 2.2 GHz. Insertion loss (IL) and return loss (RL) in the passband zone are 0.3 dB and 15 dB, respectively. The frequency response slope (roll-off rate) for the proposed LPF is very sharp and equal to 142.4 dB/GHz. The tuning range of - 3 dB cut-off frequency for the presented LPF is very wide and equal to 2.7 GHz [from 0.5 to 3.2 GHz (84.3%)]. To achieve the desired structure and harmonics suppression, a conventional power divider was designed initially, then the transmission lines (with length of lambda/4) were replaced with two LPFs. The isolation, IL, and input RL for the proposed modified Wilkinson power divider are better than 20.1 dB, 3.1 dB and 21.2 dB, respectively, at operating frequency of 1.8 GHz (GSM band). The proposed modified Wilkinson power divider eliminates the 2nd-11th harmonics with high levels of attenuation. The feature selective validation method depicts that the simulation and measurement results for the proposed LPF are in good agreement with each other.