Cooking Microwave Filters: Is Synthesis Still Helpful in Microwave Filter Design?

In "Recipe for Cooking Microwave Filters," we show the classic recipe for "cooking" with narrow-or moderate-bandwidth microwave filters. While the result of this recipe is generally effective [1] (the "cake" is only rarely not edible), the tendency of some "cooks" (often young microwave engineers) is to jump to the last two steps as quickly as possible. In fact, they consider the first two steps to be less important and definitely not necessary to obtain a filtering structure that satisfies the requirements. This approach is partially justified by the increasingly shorter times to market that the final product-the filter-requires in a business such as global telecommunications, where competition has become a fight to the death.