3-D Metal Printed Compact High-Q Folded Waveguide Filter With Folded Antenna

A novel compact fan-shaped folded waveguide resonator (FSFWGR) is proposed in this article. The resonator can reduce the size by 87.5% compared with the waveguide cavity while retaining a high unloaded quality ( $Q_{{u}})$ value (>1500). Due to these advantages, a high-quality (-Q) fourth-order bandpass filter centered at 6.0 GHz with a 6.67% bandwidth is designed first. Novel slots cross-coupling is presented to produce a pair of transmission zeros (TZs) while avoiding support structures that traditional metal probes often used. Then compact deformed folded antenna is designed to integrate with the filter. Compared with published works where the last resonator of the reference filter often needs to be detuned, all parameters here do not need to change by introducing a metal probe between the feeding point of the filter and antenna. Therefore, the integrating process is more straightforward. The integrated filter/antenna achieves the same filtering function as the reference filter and a high gain of 6.7 dBi. For experimental demonstration, metal 3-D printing technology was used to fabricate models with only two pieces that significantly reduced the assembly loss. The final measured results agreed well with simulated ones.

Automated summary

This article proposes a novel compact fan-shaped folded waveguide resonator (FSFWGR) and successfully designs a high-quality fourth-order bandpass filter, integrating with a new slot cross-coupling method and a compact antenna.