8-GHz narrowband high-temperature superconducting filter with high selectivity and flat group delay

This paper reports a development of a narrowband high-temperature superconducting filter with both high selectivity and flat group delay. The filter has a center frequency of 8.625 GHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 42 MHz (a fractional bandwidth of 0.49%). In order to achieve both high band-edge steepness and excellent group-delay flatness, we introduce a 14-resonator quasi-elliptic function response with three pairs of transmission zeros (one pair for high selectivity and two pairs for flat group delay) in the cascaded quadruplet coupling structure. We also develop a novel low radiation resonator (double-folded resonator) to reduce the parasitic coupling and meet other requirements for the 8-GHz filter. The filter was fabricated on a 2-in-diameter 0.5-mm-thick MgO wafer with double-sided YBCO films. The measured results show a midband insertion loss of 1.6 dB and a return loss better than 15.5 dB. Band-edge steepness reaches over 11.7 dB/MHz at both the high- and low-frequency edges. The 60-dB rectangle ratio is less than 1.25. The out-of-band rejection is over 70 dB at 5.98 MHz from the 3-dB band edge. The variation of group delay is less than 23 ns over 33 MHz (78.5% of 3-dB bandwidth), and less than 30 ns over 34.5 MHz (82% of 3-dB bandwidth).