A compact double equilateral U-shaped defected ground structure (DGS) unit is proposed. In contrast to a single finite attenuation pole characteristic offered by the conventional dumbbell DGS, the proposed DGS unit provides dual finite attenuation poles that can be independently controlled by the DGS lengths. A 2.4-GHz microstrip lowpass filter using five cascaded double U-shaped DGS units is designed and compared with conventional DGS lowpass filters. This lowpass filter achieves a wide stopband with overall 30-dB attenuation up-to 10 GHz and more than 42% size diminution.