In accordance with an embodiment, a noise reduction circuit includes one or more phase sampling circuits that receive an electromagnetic signal and splits the signal into an illuminated component and an ambient component. The illuminated component is transmitted along an illuminated signal path and converted to a digital signal and the ambient component is transmitted along an ambient signal path and converted to a digital signal. The digitized ambient component is subtracted from the digitized illuminated component to generate a light signal with a reduced noise component.