Fractal Geometry: An Attractive Choice for Miniaturized Planar Microwave Filter Design

Abstract

Various fractal geometries are characterized by the self-similarity and space-filling properties. The space-filling feature has been successfully applied to design multiband antenna structures for a wide variety of multifunction wireless systems. On another hand, the second feature has proved its validity to produce miniaturized antennas and passive microwave circuits including the band-pass filters (BPF). This chapter demonstrates the design of miniaturized microstrip BPFs that are derived from fractal-based DGS resonators. Many microstrip BPFs based on the Minkowski fractal DGS resonators will be presented together with those based on Moore and Peano fractal geometries. Simulation results, of all of the presented BPFs, show that an extra-size reduction can be obtained as the iteration level becomes higher. Measured and simulated results agree well with each other. A comparison has been conducted with other filters based on Peano and Hilbert fractal geometries. The results reveal that the proposed BPF offers acceptable performance and a significant decrease of higher harmonics.