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IEEE MTT-S Technical Committee 6 “RF MEMS and Microwave Acoustics” sponsored a “Switched Acoustic Filter Module” Student Design Competition at the 2025 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium.  The students were challenged to design a multi-band switched filter that combined both acoustic RF filters and RF MEMS switches.  The designs were required to have one antenna port, one transmit port, and four receive ports to realize a six-port network capable of realizing six different filter states including multiple states with carrier aggregation.  This combination of requirements presented a unique challenge to all of the design teams, and the filter performance was judged by a combination of insertion loss and return loss metrics across all of the bands and states.

Three student teams participated in the competition from three continents.  The first place team was from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität from Germany, the second place team was from Korea University, and the third place team was from the  University of Texas at Austin in the the United States.  The pictures of the filters from the three teams shown below illustrate the diversity of design approaches used by the three teams.

The switched filter boards submitted by the teams from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Korea University, and the University of Texas.

Plots of the measured response of the winning filter in a state which aggregates multiple bands is shown below.  The student designs combined the acoustic filters and MEMS switches to achieve low loss and good filter performance in all of the desired states.

Measured s-parameters of the winning design in a state in which the transmit path of Band 1 (1920-1980 MHz), receive paths for Band 1 (2110-2170 MHz), Band 3 (1805-1880 MHz), and Band 7 (2620-2690 MHz) are all routed to the antenna, and the receive path for Band 2 (1930-1990 MHz) is isolated from the antenna.

The organizers and teams would like to thank the following for contributions:  Qorvo for providing acoustic filters, Menlo Microsystems for providing RF MEMS switches, EuroCircuits for providing circuit board fabrication, and CST for providing assembly of components onto the board.