Constant K Filter - History

History

Constant k filters were invented by George Campbell. He published his work in 1922, but had clearly invented the filters some time before, as his colleague at AT&T Co, Otto Zobel, was already making improvements to the design at this time. Campbell's filters were far superior to the simpler single element circuits that had been used previously. Campbell called his filters electric wave filters, but this term later came to mean any filter that passes waves of some frequencies but not others. Many new forms of wave filter were subsequently invented; an early (and important) variation was the m-derived filter by Zobel who coined the term constant k for the Campbell filter in order to distinguish them.

The great advantage Campbell's filters had over the RL circuit and other simple filters of the time was that they could be designed for any desired degree of stop band rejection or steepness of transition between pass band and stop band. It was only necessary to add more filter sections until the desired response was obtained.

The filters were designed by Campbell for the purpose of separating multiplexed telephone channels on transmission lines, but their subsequent use has been much more widespread than that. The design techniques used by Campbell have largely been superseded. However, the ladder topology used by Campbell with the constant k is still in use today with implementations of modern filter designs such as the Tchebyscheff filter. Campbell gave constant k designs for low-pass, high-pass and band-pass filters. Band-stop and multiple band filters are also possible.