Microwave acoustic wave filters

1. A method of designing an acoustic microwave filter in accordance with frequency response requirements, comprising:

selecting a filter section based on the frequency response requirements, wherein the filter section includes an input, an output, and a plurality of circuit elements between the input and the output, the plurality of circuit elements having a paired in-line acoustic resonator and in-shunt acoustic resonator, and further having at least one of an additional in-line acoustic resonator and in-shunt resonator;

selecting a value for each of the circuit elements based on the frequency response requirements;

selecting a number of filter sections based on the frequency response requirements, each of the filter sections including an input and an output;

cascading the selected number of filter sections to create a cascaded filter circuit design, such that the inputs of at least one pair of immediately adjacent filter sections are connected to each other or the outputs of at least one pair of immediately adjacent filter sections are connected to each other;

adding parasitic effects to the cascaded filter circuit design to create a pre-optimized filter circuit design;

inputting the pre-optimized filter circuit design into a filter optimizer to create a final filter circuit design; and

fabricating an actual acoustic microwave filter based on the final filter circuit design.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising selecting the structural type of each of the resonators from one of a surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonator, a bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonator, a film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR), and a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) resonator.

3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

mapping the frequency response requirements to a normalized design space, wherein the circuit element values are normalized values that are determined based on the mapped frequency response requirements; and

unmapping the normalized circuit element values of the cascaded filter circuit design to a real design space.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein a normalized resonant frequency of the in-shunt resonator is lower than a normalized anti-resonant frequency of the in-line resonator by a factor of two to form a passband.

5. The method of claim 3 , wherein a normalized anti-resonant frequency of the in-line resonator is lower than a normalized resonant frequency of the in-shunt resonator by about by a factor of one to form a stopband.

6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising combining like circuit elements that are electrically adjacent to each other in the cascaded filter design prior to adding parasitic effects to the cascaded filter design.

7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising performing an element removal optimization of the pre-optimized filter circuit design to create the final filter circuit design.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprise a rejection requirement, and the number of filter sections is selected based on the rejection requirement.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprises at least two of a passband and a stopband, and the filter section is selected based on the at least two of the passband and the stopband.

10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the values of the paired in-line resonator and in-shunt resonator are selected to form one of the passband and the stopband.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprises the passband and the stopband.

12. The method of claim 11 , wherein the values of the paired in-line resonator and in-shunt resonator are selected to form the passband, the plurality of circuit elements has another paired in-line resonator and in-shunt resonator, and the values of the other paired in-line resonator and in-shunt resonator are selected to form the stopband.

13. The method of claim 1 , wherein the difference between the lowest resonant frequency and the highest resonant frequency of a plurality of resonators in the final filter circuit design is at least 1.25 times the frequency separation of any resonator in the plurality of resonators.

14. The method of claim 1 , wherein the difference between the lowest resonant frequency and the highest resonant frequency of a plurality of resonators in the final filter circuit design is at least two times the frequency separation of the resonator with the highest resonant frequency in the plurality of resonators.

15. The method of claim 1 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprises a passband, and wherein the frequency difference between a local minimum or a local maximum of a return loss magnitude of the final filter circuit design and the edge of the passband is at least once the frequency separation of the resonator with the highest resonant frequency in the final filter circuit design.

16. The method of claim 1 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprises a passband, and wherein the frequency difference between a local minimum or a local maximum of a return loss magnitude of the final filter circuit design and the edge of the passband is at least 1.25 times the frequency separation of the resonator with the highest resonant frequency in the final filter circuit design.

17. The method of claim 1 , wherein the frequency response requirements comprises a passband, and wherein the frequency difference between a local minimum or a local maximum of a return loss magnitude of the final filter circuit design and the edge of a passband is at least two times the frequency separation of the resonator with the highest resonant frequency in the final filter circuit design.

18. The method of claim 15 , wherein the frequency requirements include an insertion loss requirement of less than 3 dB.

19. The method of claim 1 , wherein the filter sections are identical to each other.

20. The method of claim 1 , wherein all adjacent pairs of the immediately adjacent filter sections are connected to each other via their inputs or their outputs.