Patent ID: 7750619

Claim:
A method of measuring the frequency of a received signal comprising the steps of: generating a first phase signal by digitizing the phase of the received signal, said step of generating a first phase signal including limiting the amplitude of the received signal, splitting the amplitude limited received signal into in-phase and quadrature components, thereby generating a received in-phase signal and a received quadrature signal, digitizing the received in-phase signal using a one-bit resolution, thereby generating a digitized received in-phase signal having a succession of single bits representing the signal value at a particular instant in time, digitizing the received quadrature signal using a one-bit resolution, thereby generating a digitized received quadrature signal having a succession of single bits representing the signal value at a particular instant in time, and deserializing the succession of single bits of the digitized received in-phase signal and the digitized received quadrature signal into words having a predetermined number of bits; delaying the first phase signal by a predetermined amount to generate a second phase signal; calculating a phase difference between the first and the second phase signals; and calculating the frequency of the input signal from the phase difference.