S-band full 360° high precision phase detector

In this paper, a novel S-band phase detector with a high precision is proposed and demonstrated. It consists of two analog phase detectors as well as digital circuits to improve a single analog phase detector's performance by eliminating the large error detection region and merging four linear detection regions. For a demonstration with commercially available components, it provides a full 360° phase difference detection range with a maximum detection error less than 4° for frequency at 2.4 GHz. By combing in an array, these high precision phase detectors would find themselves very useful for observing the incoming and outgoing RF signals in a modern transceiver array design. © 2012 IEEE.