Self-Oscillating Mixers: A Natural Fit for Active Antennas

The prospect of reducing the parts count, power consumption, and cost of a system by merging the mixing and signal generation functions into one circuit block explains the lasting appeal of SOMs. The widespread popularity of SOMs in the first half of the 20th century was because the economics of the electronics industry at the time made them competitive in the marketplace. The arrival of solid-state devices changed the dynamic, and SOMs became more of a curiosity for a good while until the turn of the 21st century. SOMs have a promising future again because they are a natural fit for active antennas, whose most intriguing application these days is the IoT. Technologies related to radar and telecommunications also stand to benefit from the recent advances in CMCS SOMs because their performance, when evaluated at the system level, is now comparable to using individual mixer and oscillator blocks.