A Novel Method for Phase Noise Measurement Based on Cyclic Complementary Autocorrelation

A novel digital signal processing-based method for phase noise measurement on sinusoidal signals is proposed. The method obtains the power spectral density of the phase noise by Fourier transforming its autocorrelation function. The autocorrelation function of the phase noise is in turn derived from the cyclic complementary autocorrelation function of the analytical version of the sinusoidal signal under test. The method proves that, taking advantage of the cyclostationarity properties of the signal under test, it is possible to improve the sensitivity in phase noise measurements by diminishing the effects of the instrumentation noise, which mainly limits the performance of the majority of the digital processing-based approaches.