An all-digital phase-measurement techniques using clipped-quadrature correlation

An all-digital method is presented for determining the phase of a noise-contaminated tone signal relative to an internal reference after the signal has been bandpass-filtered and hardlimited. The process involves the cross correlation of the input signal with a pair of quadrature-related one-bit binary reference phase signals, followed by an algorithm which computes the phase from these clipped-quadrature correlation coefficients. After a description of the signal processing, performance predictions are made for a practical hardware implementation. Finally, performance data from a working model is presented. The data validates the predictions and establishes the viability of the phase-measurement technique.