Hi, check this out. It's a 4k resolution 22 inch monitor. You might be thinking me, what's the big deal, They're dime a dozen people. Toss those things away in the dumpster these days.

Well what if I told you that this thing cost $18,000 Andrew was released in the year 2000? That's 19 years ago. Would you be impressed? I Know I was and this was the state of the art monitor for nearly a decade. It is one of the most remarkable monitors ever produced, and this is the IBM T2, 2, 1 or 2 20 series. As I said $18,000 This is actually the upgraded model the T2 T1 released a year or so later and they dropped the price to a bargain $8,000 but you got to remember 4k resolution 3800 by 2400 in the year 2000.

Wow 4k monitors actually haven't been around for that long. The first consumer 4k monitor I believe was in a Zeus monitor in 2013 and it was a 31 inch monitor. This is a 22 inch monitor with full 4k resolution 204 pixels per inch. Wow So this monitor affectionately known as Big Bertha I believe that was its internal code name, but IBM the famous three letters on the top was the dominant monitor for practically a decade in terms of resolution in terms of dots per inch.

Absolutely remarkable technology. for its day, it still holds up pretty well today. As you can see, it still works as a standard PC 4k monitor and there's some fantastic technology Spared no expense inside this thing. As I said, released at 18,000 dollars and I guess you could actually buy this as a consumer back then, but it was not a consumer.

Monday It was designed for the high-end professional market. The first prototypes of these monitors actually went to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory So all of those you know those physics things and all those high-end life sciences stuff that really needed to model things and display stuff in high resolution. This was the only game in town in 2018 Grande. Hey Chump Change! So thank you very much to the viewer who donated this thing.

Uh, and we're gonna do a teardown to find out what makes this tick because I think there's some no-expense-spared technology in here. Let's go teardown time. Sorry I Turned it on first and if we put a microscope up to the screen, you can see the individual piece pixels there. the picture elements the red, green, and blue, but you'll notice that there's actually are two of each color and they kind of look different.

And that's because this is what's called a Joule domain display. And your domain means that there's there's two pixels for each color and they're actually angled differently. So this increases the field of view in the display and this display is really excellent. Field of view.

and IBM were one of the pioneers in these dual domain. Well, in this case it's an IPS display everything. So IPS these days isn't it you hear about all the time. But back then it was a big deal.

It's an in-plane switching dual domain. LCD Brilliant pioneering technology for the day. So here it is and it's actually quite large and heavy. It's got a big bezel around it like this weighs about 13 kilos or there abouts just got a simple button interface, power and brightness and menu and it does actually tilt like that which is good.

can tilt all the way down like that which is actually quite nice or all the way back. it's thick as because as we'll see it's going to have lots of circuitry inside to drive this baby with 2000 era technology. So or you know near on 20 year old technology now and it does come with a cover plate that goes over there but this is all just designed to get the cables out the bottom here and come out the back and you can actually clamp them. Whilst it does have standard deviation in Puts doesn't have the DVI connectors, it's got these Lfh 60 connectors for separate DVI inputs here plus a molex power connecting surprise I Couldn't fit the our supply inside but there you go.

It's a big brick. I Believe the maunder takes about 130 watts nominal and the cable that comes with it is that Lfh Sixty Two dual DVI Like this and you can either plug in one, two or four and it's got a USB as well. but this, you don't have to plug that in, That's for our firmware upgrade, plus some color management stuff which I haven't played around with presumably for you know, color calibration. and I Do believe it came with two video cards as well.

Seriously, it doesn't have the DVI on there. It's just got the Lfh Sixty and this is a NVIDIA Quadro Fx37 TLP There you go, Old-school like it's a nothing graphics card these days. but I don't know was that hot shot in 2000? The most fascinating thing about this monitor is as I said, you can even plug in one DVI and it works fine. Or you can plug in two DVI or you can plug in 4 DV I Don't believe three works.

So why? Well, if you plug in one DVI then it only has a 13 Hertz refresh rate. You plug in two, it jumps up the 25, you plug in all four and it jumps up. The 41 Hertz refresh rate in the monitor itself is 41 Hertz and apparently it splits up the screen into 960 by 2400 columns. but of course you know it doesn't like.

Skip them. if you're only plug in one, you still get your full resolution. It's just the update rate that changes, so that's absolutely fascinating. Does anyone know of another monitor that does that? Because presumably you've only got X number of Art lanes in here and they just didn't couldn't transfer all the data at the time.

Anyway, with the technology they had back in 2000 so you had to use multiple ones to get the bandwidth required to get the full 38 40 by 2400 resolution at 41. Hertz Incredible! And the demo you saw me just run I was just using a single DVI in a standard latest Gtx 1030 video card. It works into text just fine to take to the full resolution and you can see that's actually got primary and secondary written on those. There's a fan in there to worki be cool.

It wasn't particularly loud at all. But anyway, let's take this beast apart and have a look. It's going to have no expense spared technology. no thought given to mass production.

They just really didn't care. This is not a consumer. Monda They were only going to sell these in low volume. As I said too late research into institutions, government departments, and physics researchers.

stuff like that. Who had a requirement for the high-definition screen back then? remember you could put on this one 22 inch monitor. You could put 4 full HD screens at once. I Mean that was just remarkable almost 20 years ago.

All the details for those playing along at home. There for you. Serial number of fishing ADO's Ah, you can't stand monitors up like that anymore. Beautiful.

2 extra sneaky bugger screws get along that edge. Beautiful. We're not in like Flynn Just look at the shielding on this puppy mesh grille thing of beauty. Joy forever.

Check this out. Absolutely no screws at all holding that in I Just had to take a bit of the tape off for the ribbon cable would going down to the front connected down there. I Think that's just the fans? Yeah, might have to disconnect those and we're in like Flynn Not a single screw, just the 6 outer Phillips on there. Ah, Beautiful.

Nice big out tera apex. FPGAs Wow Wow, that's really something. Check it out. Two huge out here at Apex FPGAs would take a closer look at those.

This is just your processing board let alone your driving board because you can see all the flat flexes come in from the board underneath. You can see how they're probably split these into four columns. As I said, it processes these in 960 by 2400 Al rows are just these buggering off here. so geez, not much in that.

Yeah, was it cereal? Over to the rose? Really right? But you know? Dada Check it out. I See a genuine bog there look at that. They've poached in a larger resistor under the smaller pads. They've ganked a dam and there's another bunch up there.

But of course you gotta bow jizz in these sort of things because as I said, they're not gonna re spin the ball because they don't manufacture these in the millions. They manufacture these in the thousands, so add in a couple of links and bages anywhere is no problem whatsoever. Morbo Jizz up here. Look at that ah thing of beauty.

Fantastic. Then cut some wires running over to the bottom side. That's common. of course.

Often you might have to connect these to the bottom side and there's a couple of ways you can do that if you got like a like a very simple board with large vias or some other holes and you can actually put them down the Vias tiny little mod wires down there and get them over to the other side. You can put them, or you can solder them onto the vias. but in this case, we've got like a huge multi layer, almost certainly blind and buried vias in there. You have to run the wires over the edge of the board and you know, occasionally you might drill through if you know what you're doing.

If you've got access to the original files you can see oh yeah, I can drill through that point, but of course then you can short out internal planes and do all sorts of other stuff. Yeah, nasty flapping around in the breeze and let's flip it down. Tada, you're the huge bodge wires on the bottom. Huge, gorgeous looking ribbon cables going over.

Absolutely fantastic power budge wires. Look at that. Well, they just they couldn't get that through on the inner layer. obviously the low impedance required through the inner planes I guess so they had to wire those straight over that so it's not actually an afterthought.

Well, it might have been at the PCB stage. I Might have been like hoping that they could do it on the PCB but then they went meant no, sorry, can't do. We have to add another four layers and use two ounce bloody copper or something like that. So they decided.

oh bugger that. And they integrated the proper pad so it's not a bodge. it's actually they designed the board like that, may even added the silkscreen like that to show the cables go over. So yeah, that's one of the trade-offs when you're designing products like the especially ones that require high power.

It is a trade-off because we've got those massive BGA's on the top of this board. Remember that these are probably thousand pin BJ's with tiny little pissant pads that are thermally to actually solder those and get a decent yield on those. Then you know you can't just go using two ounce copper willy-nilly to get you your impedances down on your huge power requirement sections and stuff like that. So it's a real trade-off when you're designing boards like this that are combined in a fairly light, beefy, large amount of power here like 130 watts in this particular case and got ridiculously high-end These would have been bleeding-edge at the time FPGAs And just the you know, it's the assembly requirements that you'll come a guts are on and it's not uncommon to have to do a trade-off like that.

This guide I give up and today cable runs and wires. That's a life of a PCB designer. But therein lies an interesting discussion which could go on for hours about whether or not like adjust the PCB layout designer was responsible for this because you can get PCB layout designers who hadn't I'm not gonna say nothing, but they know like little about the design side of things, but they're very good at board layout. They understand all the rules and things like that.

But when you're coming, guts are with some sort of you know, power requirements trade-off They might often know that, but they won't be a preview. Look into the design and things like that, It would have to be whoever the design engineer, responder team responsible for you know, overseeing this would have had to go. Look. We're going to have to run some wires over here.

We've done the calculations we're not going to be able to. you know, get the impedance down to what we need to. There's too much voltage drop on those inner planes and we're gonna have solder in problems with the FPGAs And it's all a big team trade-off There's something as simple as what might look like. Bodge wires can have a lot of engineering reasons and resources and history behind it and everything else, so it would have been interesting to know whether or not they just knew that from the get-go weather and hot they assembled the boys tried do it on the copper and went, not failed or FPGAs couldn't be soldered properly or whatever it was And then they went.

Yep, okay, let's add the wires. Hmm. all right so let's have a look at the board here and the first thing is I'm actually quite surprised that there are no extra FPGAs in this thing. It's done with these two big our Tara FPGA is.

although of course there's no surprise for finding the biggest FPGA of the time. The our Tara apex in here is actually when they first came out. there are at least in 99. So the 20k 400 device which is what we have in here.

This was the very first release of this. it's not the most powerful one. They did actually eventually release extras here. If we go down the product table here, you can see this is the one we got here, the 20k 400.

It's got over a million system gates 212 K of Ramble though we saw we had extra memory on there as well. but they did eventually release higher-end parts in this and you saw prices there 18 650 to 2,400 dollars depending on the speed grades on that show with speed great. Let's just say to Grandpa FPGA So there's 4 grand just in FPGA is there. So you can see when they designed these monitors back in 2000, there's there's $4,000 just in those two chips there.

so yeah, that's a big deal. So you can see what we talked about before about how yield on these boards do. To say if you use 2 ounce copper in these because you needed to get the the power distributed across that retains more heat and then FPGAs don't float. They get trickier to reflow and other parts get trickier to reflow.

And if you get bad yield on a $2,000 fpga, well, it could ruin your day, even in these sort of low volumes, so you can see why. But by far, the most expensive item in this entire monitor would have been the IPS dual domain display itself, which was absolutely state of the art at the time. So I don't know what. the raw cost of that and the yield on that wouldn't have been terrific either.

So and of course, they wouldn't have accepted any dead pixels, which was I think three is still reasonably common around that era 2 except that sort of stuff. But anyway, these do everything. There's none on the back, there's none on the other board. So there you go, and we've got some.

We've got the DVI receivers there and they're just TI panel bus digital receivers. There you go. You play along with that at home if you want, and there's actually four of those. There's two on the top and two on the bottom, so no surprises there and they just all flow directly into the apex.

FPGA is. But the interesting thing is I keep saying FPGAs because but they're actually not. These are. Interestingly, there are.

They're programmable logic devices. Look up here, you have a look at the datasheet. They're industry's first programmable logic device. They're a P or D.

They actually use a slightly different architecture than what your more modern FPGAs do. although these do have a ton of flexibility and you could actually they released soft cores for these as well. You could get ARM processor cores and everything you can throw in these just like FPGAs but they're actually more suited to more deterministic time in which my Bastard Bloody Camera stupid bloody Auto power off on my Canon camcorder. I'm using here when I've got the mains plugged in.

it doesn't happen on battery I'm a battery now anyway. yeah, they're more deterministic behavior, which for something like this I can understand. like a high-end critical timing at the time. To do all this sort of stuff we won't Yeah, like won't talk about the details too much.

but yeah. anyway, these were state-of-the-art FPGAs at the time, even though these were the architectures and they were these released in 99. but then they'll followed on with the Strad exciting architecture FPGA is and then after that pretty much they just FPGA is for everything. and if you search for the term FPGA in there, you'll see them talk about this.

This fast-track interconnect, this global routing structure provides predictable performance, even in complex designs. In contrast, the segmented routing in FPGA is requires switch matrices to connect a variable number of rounding pass, increase in the delay between the logic. That's why I was talking about more predictable and faster timing within the chip and that may or might not have been valuable in this particular application. But anyway, this was the biggest bad boy on the block back in 2000.

Couple of grand each, but even that like that's not an expensive FPGA I've used more expensive ones. so these are our panel driver chips down here and there's more on the bottom as well. So basically flows in here, gets processed by the FPGAs and just spills straight out into the connectors. This is these vias here.

go down onto those big flat flex connect as you can see the big brackets on the back there. so they just basically flows yeah in through out boom, straight to the other board which then has the LVDS drivers which then drives the panels. But yeah, that's basically it. So the complexity inside this thing I expected a fair bit more, so it's interesting.

We've got an another microchip a 16, C 7, 6, 5 in a PLC C socket for the win and you can see look, we've got some our clock drivers over here. These are our 0 Cyprus 0 delay buffers here, so various clocks. So I'm guessing that the microchip pic here controls the different clocking and resolution modes and maybe you know, handles some like mode changes and processing and handles the different as you plug in the different monitors and stuff like that. As I said, there are different refresh rates.

Of course it doesn't do any of that in real time. it's just instructing the FPGA to do things because these they wouldn't have been running any sort of processor inside these. sorry PL DS Yes. So the external microchip parts are doing that and we've got some our tera parts up there.

They look like some memory. it's at our boot memory that looks like it. She said usually you'd put those like right near the chips. Anyway, what else we got? Got two other microchip parts here, so I'm not sure what all that starts doing.

just got some gates down there and your power supplies. look at those 5 milli ohm resistors there. Ah, big beefy, they're doing some current sense in there and that's about all she wrote. We've got some Diode EES running down here and that connectors buggering off to the board on the bottom.

I Don't know why. they've got what looks like some configuration resistors over here and test points I've got those here on the other side as well over there. So yeah. Anyway, we've got four fan connectors down there.

We've only got two fans fitted. There's a couple of things down the bottom. It's about all. She wrote another fuse as fuses everywhere.

Users coming out the wazoo here and up there for the also for the that goes off to the backlight our display so that be mostly power and maybe a control signal as well. That's about all on top. There's nothing much extra on the bottom side really, except the interface memory. You can see all the other memory is actually under here like this.

So all this routing and all these two series termination resistors here on the FPGA. That's common to put series resistors in the data lines just to take the edge off, and that's all going to the external memory, which would be like your frame buffers and everything else holding your display information. but yeah, I'm just generally surprised that they just did everything in there. but I guess that's all they needed.

Obviously couldn't do any one. they had split out into two that's for your flat flex fetish aficionados and you can just see the bottom side of the board there. They've got all the memory around here. They've got the extra panel drivers.

what extra panel drivers down here and over here as well. but that's about all she wrote. There's not much else doing there really. And of course the interface receivers and what's that at the top? A whole bunch of can't really see those and then on our bottom board here.

there is basically nothing on the bottom of this thing. very little and this basically just distributes I Thought they'd be more processing down in here but all the display informations are already done already comes over all these differential pairs and they just flow down to these what's called it's written on their Mini LVDS chips and these many LVDS chips. This is actually a Texas Instruments thing and here it is Mini LVDS interface specification and this actually this monitor was released before the Mini LVDS standard was actually announced and it was a cooperation between Ti and IBM at the time. so that would have been one of the first chips that in will the first chip under that a collaboration between TI and IBM.

So I guess they couldn't. the LVDS drivers at the time just weren't suitable. they weren't fast enough I Don't know what the deal is, but anyway they teamed up with 30i and they developed this new Mini LVDS standard and this was the first chip used. I Can't actually find any data on any ready data on that.

there's later ones, data are available for later versions but not that particular one anyway. so there's four of those and there's a little our Tara PLD in there. it's just doing some housekeeping not sure what anyway. just some glue, jellybean logic or whatever.

and the rest of this is power supply stuff. And as you can see all those caps up there for the power going, there's all the bias voltages for the LCDs and stuff like that. Got the same thing going on over here as well. No biggie because you're gonna have all of your high-frequency stuff shielded by using shielded ribbons down here and all just your DC bias voltages and stuff just going over a regular Joe Bloggs ribbon.

so that's all she wrote on the bottom. 9 megapixels made in Japan All the best stuffs made in Japan and I Just love how these gigantic flex displays all have these custom metal brackets holding them on cuz these are a flex two board interconnects and you can't just have them like vibrating or you know, pulling loose cuz they're a huge number away on these and really you need like a very stiff backing plate like they custom metal plate to to hold them in place so you know when they're being transported or something like that because there's a lot of just a lot of design engineers don't think about actually transporting their products and there are actually your vibration standards for transport whether it's by Road or by air or by rail and there's various standards wet, you know, various vibration modes that you would have had to have tested it as something like this to. and if you just had the flat flex without these screwed in backing plates, there's X amount of force that's going to keep those those connectors in and they may or may not have had plastic clips on them and that may be enough, but maybe they don't So they decided to add in these, uh, you know, screwing metal plates and then then you don't have to worry about it and check this out. Looks like those flat flexors have.

look. this is copper. So this is big copper tape probably on the back here. They're entirely shielded all the way over.

So oh yeah, there. Yeah, there it is there. You can see the big shield on the on the back there. so they've actually got that those those shields tied into you can see the ground, the thermal relief going in there.

They've got those tied into the PCB So as well as providing a backing force on there to keep the connectors in, it also provides a very secure grounding point as well. Brilliant. Like. Spared no expense.

Really spectacular. Spared no expense spared. no expense spared. no expense.

And yep, there's no plastic retainers on those. So yeah, they would have just fallen straight out when you put it on the truck. so they had to add those plates. and I Love the stiffening plate on the back as well because it's just it's beautiful.

and I totally forgot to mention the hot snot when if you budge aficionados, there's the back side of the budge there. I Love the Kapton tape just holding it down nicely. Beautiful. and another one over there as well.

looks like a couple of little diodes. What is that? Zoom in. These are just LVDS drivers. Look, they come.

You can see that they come straight from the connectors here. so you know, really I'm not doing much at all just driving the ribbon cable as I said down to then what? but well a lot of people might call like a T-con board or whatnot so that goes to your you call them drivers down there. that one's got a bit of dust in it, but apart from that it's pretty clean. But yeah, there's not much doing on there at all.

If your high speed stuff of course is going on these ribbon cables here, these are all your LVDS you see, they all go as pairs in there so they're all buggering off and you can tell because they're fully shielded cables as well. high speed stuff If I get a torch right along the top there. Trust me, we ain't miss much. There's no real circuitry on there, just a bunch of caps.

There's nothing under here between the big thick aluminium frame. so really that's basically just an interface and NGO interface board going over to. You're then going into your larger flat flex or multiple flat flexes them which would then go into your IPS LCD panel in there. So yeah, I Like, trust me, we're not missing anything by not taking all that apart and having a look in there really.

And it looks to be the same for the row driver boards over here as well. and I'd like I don't want this to be as destructive teardown because this is a gorgeous monitor and really I've looked at those sort of stuff before you can see our LCD TV tear downs where I've actually gone right down and looked at the interfaces the the chip on flex drivers on there for all the columns and rows and things like that. So I won't do it here because it's still all the same. But yeah, this is like, well, this is a state of the art LCD I don't know you actually made the actual LCD display I don't actually know So yeah, but seems to be a lot of work to rip the whole thing apart and get in there so I might just leave it.

but if anyone knows, but leave it in the comments. but this would have been a state of the art. IPS LCD panel full 4k back in the day cost an absolute fortune. It's probably you know, thousands of dollars just manufacturing cost in the LCD panel alone.

And just check out the backlight driver board, there isn't that gorgeous. I Love that they've got this big plastic shield over it that's terrific. That's to stop people poking in there. And none of that LED backlighting rubbish either.

This is CCFL all the way. So thank you very much to Brian Vin Veneer donating this for a teardown. Absolutely fantastic! So if you like this video, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always you can discuss down below in the comments or over on the Eevblog forum.

and I hope you found that interesting. And if you know any more details about this monitor or you worked on the design team or you know someone who did, please let us know. It's just a gorgeous example of state-of-the-art engineering at the time, not worrying about production cost or any of that rubbish. It sold what it sold for basically and there was absolutely no thought given to get in the cost down on this thing.

And it's just. it's built like a tank and it's just gorgeous. Spared no expense. I Love this kind of engineering.

It's fantastic anyway. hope you enjoyed it. Catch you next time.