Fabrication of C-Band High-Temperature Superconducting Microstrip Triplexer with High Accuracy

Abstract

This article presents a miniaturized C-band triplexer fabricated with high-temperature superconducting (HTS) microstrip lines and to be applied to quantum computers. The triplexer consists of three bandpass filters and branch lines. In the design of the bandpass filters, folded step impedance resonators (SIRs) are firstly used to achieve good stopband performances by harmonic suppression. Secondly, cross-coupling structures are also utilized to further improve the passband edge steepness of the bandpass filters. Finally, the parasitic transmission zeros originating from the assembling box sizes are employed to achieve a deeper out-of-band rejection. Three bandpass filters are designed and connected to the common input port of the triplexer. After that, the triplexer is coarsely optimized by advanced design system (ADS) for time-saving and is finely optimized by Sonnet for better accuracy. The optimized layout of the triplexer is fabricated on a 2-inch diameter and 0.5 mm thickness MgO wafer; here, the MgO wafer is double-sided coated with HTS YBa₂Cu₃O₇ (YBCO) thin films. The measured passband bandwidths (return loss greater than 12 dB) of the triplexer are 6.420-6.680 GHz, 6.780-7.030 GHz, and 7.110-7.380 GHz, respectively, which satisfy the required design specifications.