K-band fully reconfigurable pseudo-elliptic waveguide resonator filter with tunable positive and negative couplings

This paper presents a K-band fully reconfigurable waveguide resonator filter with a new negative coupling structure. A pair of transmission zeros as well as the center frequency and bandwidth of the presented filter can be adjusted. The filter adopts the concept of a frequencytunable coupling resonator in designing the coupling structure, which allows for controlling the coupling coefficient. All coupling values in the filter structure can be tuned by adjusting the resonant frequency of each frequency-tunable coupling resonator. This work also presents a design method in detail for the coupling resonator with a negative coupling coefficient. In addition, the approach for separating the resonant peak produced by the coupling resonator with a negative coupling value from the passband for the purpose of improving the stopband performance is described. For verifying the presented filter structure, a fourth-order waveguide filter has been fabricated and measured. The fabricated filter has the center frequency tuning range from 18.34 GHz to 18.75 GHz, the bandwidth tuning ratio of 1:94 : 1.