At any given time, a multitude of signals at various frequencies are streaming all around us. Devices such as televisions, radios, radars, medical devices, and cell phones rely on receiving the proper RF signal to deliver what’s expected by the end user. Therefore, each of these devices requires some level of filtering to attenuate or remove unwanted signals from the desired channel. Without filtering, these devices can become saturated and unwanted signals can combine with desired signals to corrupt information.
While all filters have the same basic job—to remove unwanted or out-of-band signals—the specific job requirements of each filter vary depending on the given RF architecture and needs of the target device. In addition, the need for filtering is frequency-agnostic. While there’s an overall trend for RF devices to operate at higher frequencies across applications, especially in the mobile telecom industry, it’s not the requisite filtering jobs that are changing as much as the technologies needed for filtering at these higher frequencies.