WR-3 Band Waveguide Filter Tolerance Analysis and Surface Metallization Comparison
Daniel Miek, Fynn Kamrath, Patrick Boe, Michael Höft
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, a fifth-order WR-3 band waveguide filter with two transmission zeros (TZs) is presented. The design process is described and manufacturing issues are addressed. The filter is designed to fulfill a center frequency of 237.9 GHz and a fractional bandwidth of 2.64%. Three identical filters are manufactured with the classical computerized numerical control (CNC) milling technique in order to obtain information about the manufacturing repeatability for filter structures in the WR-3 band. The comparison shows that even in very high frequency regions a good repeatability can be achieved, if modern high-speed cutting (HSC) CNC milling machines are used. A comprehensive tolerance analysis is accomplished to classify the obtained results. The filters were manufactured from brass to ensure a meaningful comparability and due to the good machining qualities in CNC machines. In order to reduce the losses, the filters are afterwards sputtered with different materials (gold, silver, copper) to evaluate the effect on the insertion loss at very high frequencies. In comparison with the literature, it is shown that even narrow-band filters, which show a high sensitivity to machining tolerances, can be manufactured with high reliability and manufacturing repeatability in modern CNC milling machines. One of the measured filters shows a return loss higher than 20 dB over the whole passband.