Abstract This paper investigates the changes in the waveform of a sinusoidal carrier resulting from amplitude modulation (AM) process. Based on this analysis, a novel method for extracting amplitude information is proposed. The proposed method uses the behaviour of the amplitude limitation which does not significantly affect the slope of the sinusoidal signal near zero crossing points. A simple comparator is used to convert the changes in sinusoidal slope near zero crossing points into pulse width changes. A simple circuit is proposed which keeps the output pulse width of the comparator constant by a simple control loop. The accuracy of the method is evaluated through simulation and is experimentally tested. If the modulation index is high and the amplitude of the input signal to the detector is limited, the proposed method can yield up at least 9 dB improvement in relative error power. However, if the modulation index is small, the improvement in relative error power can be at least 35 dB compared to other conventional types of AM demodulators.