Compact and selective lowpass filter with very wide stopband using tapered compact microstrip resonant cells

A novel microstrip lowpass filter is proposed. It consists of a simple tapered structure using periodical compact microstrip resonant cells. Owing to the introduction of the tapered structure, the proposed lowpass filter has successfully addressed simultaneously the problems of compactness, matching, selectivity, insertion loss and the suppression of spurious frequency bands. A demonstration filter has been designed, fabricated and tested to show the validity of the proposed structure.