Performance of a limiting amplifier in white and colored noise

Abstract

Nonlinear receiver architectures are often employed in low-power wireless communications to reduce hardware complexity and power consumption at the cost of a degradation in performance compared to their linear counterparts. This work presents analytical and statistical methods to quantify this degradation in performance. It is shown that the maximum degradation is equal to −1.96 dB in terms of output signal to noise ratio. If the noise is colored, e.g. due to a preceding channel filter, the performance degradation can be reduced significantly.