Patent ID: 8319551

Claim:
A limiting amplifier circuit with improved phase noise, comprising: an input port; an output port; and n cascaded gain stage (where n is an integer greater than 1, having an input of a first gain stage connected to the input port, an output of a last gain stage connected to the output port, and an output of each gain stage connected to an input of an adjacent gain stage, wherein each gain stage i (where i is an integer) of the n gain stages includes a bandwidth selector for selecting at least one lowpass filter corner frequency ω p i , and thereby reducing the phase noise of the gain stage through the broadband noise reduction for frequencies greater than ω p i , and ω p i is selected from a plurality of values associated with the gain stage to optimize the phase noise of the limiting amplifier by trading off reducing the broadband noise of the gain stage versus maintaining a sufficient output slew-rate of the gain stage.