Patent ID: 8126420

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a phase-to-digital converter (PDC) to receive a local oscillator (LO) signal and to determine a digital phase noise value corresponding to a measure of phase noise present in the LO signal, the PDC comprising: a counter to receive the LO signal, the counter controlled by a reference clock, wherein the counter is to generate a count of LO signal cycles during a cycle of the reference clock; a first storage coupled to the counter to store the count; a delay line coupled to receive the LO signal, the delay line having L stages each to provide an output; a second storage coupled to receive the L outputs and to provide a value of the L outputs responsive to the reference clock; a decoder coupled to the second storage to receive the values and generate a decoder output corresponding to a number of partial LO cycles during the reference clock cycle; and a first mixer to receive an intermediate frequency (IF) signal obtained from a received radio frequency (RF) signal and remove phase noise from the IF signal using the digital phase noise value.