Hi check out what I scored on ebay. It's an ultrasound machine. Check it out. I got it for, uh, next to Nick's Um, sorry, I can't get this in shot here.

It's a bit, uh, a bit hard. It's um, about a mid 90s vintage ultra sound machine. It's an Atl brand. Um, Hdi 3000 and it's not supposed to be working.

There's supposed to be like some sort of software, uh, fault with it or something like that. Uh, the thing is, this thing weighs a ton. Uh, we had to hire a Ute to transport this thing and to get it back weighs about 200 kilos. So to get it on and off the truck, we had to actually take out all the cards.

The power supply, the monitor had to disconnect everything, Uh, to actually transport it back here. So they sell a lot of these on ebay. Anyway, picked it up for next to nothing, so I think it costs more to hire the Ute than it did to actually buy this thing. Now just to give you a very quick look at the boards inside this thing, we've got ourselves an analog power supply, a digital power supply that's all.

plus uh, five volts. We've got a, uh, what they call a master power supply plus minus 12 volts, minus five, and a variable one. Then we've got uh, a disc controller. here.

It's a magneto optical disk. Uh, we've got a front end, uh, controller board here and all these boards. These are all heavily shielded. Look at this.

all this Rf braiding all down here. Pci connectors on here and this. board here is an analog interface module. Then we've got a doppler acquisition board here.

and then we've got a channel board. So we've got eight different channel boards you can physically see. They're a bit different here. and these Pci slots down here actually plug into.

This is the backboard here and you can see all the Pci slots here that actually plugs into there. And Bingo! They're your huge custom multi-way connectors for your three ultrasound probes. And that shielding plate was manufactured 94 by 3d Manufacturing I guess. Hi! That's not the least bit embarrassing, is it? Um, yeah.

I shot that video a few years ago. Let's just say on my Eev blog 2 channel. if you're not subscribed to Evely blog 2, then you probably wouldn't know that. I've had this ultrasound machine for quite a while now and it's been sitting here in the bunker.

And yes, the bunker is kind of space disadvantaged at the moment. So I'm looking to get rid of this ultrasound machine. So I finally am getting around to doing a teardown of this thing so we've already gone through. I just reused the footage because I don't know.

It was cool and I could I guess so I thought we'd do a tear down of it. I've already go over to Eevblog2. I'll link that full video in where I actually power this thing up and we couldn't actually get it working. There was some sort of software fault with that.

I don't know what. I can't remember what it was. I haven't watched the video. So yeah, I thought we'd tear this puppy down and see what makes it an ultrasound machine tick.

Even though it's an old one. it's not one of these new whiz-bang 3d ones or whatever. Um, that you know show you what your baby's really going to look like when it's born. But this is still a very powerful ultrasound machine used for a ton of stuff.

In fact, I have a list abdominal obstacle. I was going to read out this list, but I'll just include it here anyway. It could be used for lots of stuff. You've no doubt if you've had anything wrong with you, uh, physically, or you've had kids.

Of course you know all about the ultrasound machine. Although one of these stupid things or possibly the stupid operator could have been a Peb Cac, I could not diagnose my torn Acl um, in my knee that I had that time. So yeah, I went actually nine months without knowing that I had a torn Acl. so I didn't know that.

So I went through the full like rehab of trying to rehab my knee thinking that, oh, there's just you know, something wrong with it. There's nothing really torn, but I need to rehab it. Spent nine months doing that. Um, I even got back to obstacle racing.

I was doing like 12 kilometer obstacle races with no Acl. Um yeah. anyway. Bloody Ultrasounds.

So anyway, I didn't have a 4k camera back then, so I'm going to shoot the rest of this in 4k because there might be a lot of detail on this boards. Uh, for those interested. Anyway, what we're really interested in is the boards in this thing and quite possibly the Uh sensors as well. because I do have a couple of the sensors there, but they look completely molded.

I might have to get the old dremel out on those babies. But anyway, here's the keyboard for those playing along at home. Yes! Fantastic trackball. They were the Gui input device of choice back in the 60s and were they invented in the 60s? Could it? or was it yeah, something like that.

Love it. Anyway, lots of nice uh sliders. These don't have any labeling on them whatsoever, but two, four, six, eight. This is an eight channel uh, ultrasound.

so they control the gain I guess of the eight channels or whatever. and you know, nice big functional buttons and everything's uh, custom. And they've got custom controls for you know, pretty much everything. and on the rest of it, there's a space down there that's for a uh printer like they.

you know you can get the old school printouts. now. they give you, email you or message you the uh file or whatever and the heat. you know, then you just share it on Facebook.

and here's my new baby and whatever. Now I showed you, uh, the heavy shielding around all the ultrasound stuff around here. Absolutely incredible. And these custom connectors on, uh, this of course isn't normally exposed like there is like a big cover plate that goes over that makes it all look fancy pantsy.

Like a ton of shielding. It's just insane, but that's what you expect. Ultrasounds are like a really high power levels at, you know, significant frequencies. I like, you know, megahertz.

And yes, please, excuse the crude of the light in the bunker here. I didn't have time to build it, to scale or to paint it. These are custom connectors. These are absolutely incredible.

Look at that. They're the connectors on this bad boy. I mean, you can count how many pins on there. I dare you.

But look at the shielding also around that. it's just nuts. And on the back, here's not a huge amount of stuff. Uh, there's the magneto optical 128 meg, uh, disc in this bad boy.

and there's a whole bunch of like, uh, you know, external, um what's E-net I don't know, and uh, siri custom thing. And there's audio output as well so that you can hook it up. Uh, you know, in the doctor's office they can hook it up and you can hear the baby's heartbeat and you know stuff like that. Then we just got various uh, video outputs, Rgb and things like that.

Once again, they can hook it up to like a larger monitor in the, uh, doctor's office or whatever. 1450 Va for those playing along at home and a whole bunch of fans in the back of this bad boy. And that's about all she wrote. So there you go.

Let's get these boards out. get them back to the lab. Yeah, just have a look at that amazing shield in there. Absolutely incredible.

And if you notice, well, where do the signals come out to get to the connector card edge connectors right all the way down the bottom. Here they just poke out from the Rf braid shield in there, which then contacts the top of the metal front panel connector down here. There you go. So this has got this huge metal plate on there, so that's what, then contacts all of the metal braid up there so nothing can escape this bad boy.

I mean, it's just like I've never seen shielding like this. It's just absolutely incredible. So there's a front panel board on there. That's what the, uh, those huge connectors on the front actually connect to.

There you go, those ones. So they look like Pcb connectors by the looks of it. So we'll take off and try and take this whole thing apart because it looks like there's a whole bunch of relays and other things like that in there that, uh, switch the individual channels. All right, let's take a look at the individual boards from this beast.

Unfortunately, I'm only gonna have to spend a brief time on each one because there's just so many boards in this and so many things we could talk about like this could be like a two hour long video. Anyway, as always, I'll provide high-res photos over on Evblog.com so that you can explore these to your heart's content. Now this one here is the Master Power Supply Control board. and this one, actually, as as you can tell by the heatsinks here, does actually supply some power in this particular case.

Plus minus 12 volts, minus 5.2 volts and a 24 volts for the fans as well. And it's obviously, you know, fairly beasty. It looks like they've got uh, modules under like a power brick. modules under here.

Um, unfortunately. to get those, uh, I could, I could pry a couple of those off and uh, have a look at the modules, but they'll just be some third-party um, off-the-shelf modules that they've either off the shelf or ones that they've contracted the company, uh, to supply in this particular case. But as you can see, it's got a fair bit of smarts up here as well. And of course, all the interfaces are dim.

Four, one six, one two, uh connectors common as mud in uh, you know the industry uh, standard backplane? uh connector. These are the uh, three row jobbies here. and of course, you'd have our power spread across multiple pins and you'd have a whole ton of functions on here. It looks like they've got a huge bar on here that's uh, is that a um, like that's got to be like a stiffening bar or something like that.

Doesn't appear to be a power bust based on any of that. So yeah, I would say that, uh, it's just some sort of stiffening bar. Yeah, you want a good stiffy, that's for sure. Now, this board not only supplies some power of its own, but it also does all the monitoring as well.

You can see that here. they've got a Plcc package. now. that surface mount rubbish.

Thank you very much. That's an Intel Adc152 one. Got the Ram. Good old Dallas, uh, non-volatile memory there.

that would be, uh, pushing its age there. They're only supposed to have like, officially like a 10, I think, maybe even 15-year uh, battery life in them. It's basically a Uh S Ram. It's a watchdog timer as it's got a watchdog as well.

uh, that particular one. but it's basically, um, an Sro non-volatile Sram with a physical Lithium battery in there. But these typically, would you know? people were getting like, you know, 20 years out of these isn't that uncommon. But you can see that it also does all the monitoring of all the other power rails in the system generated by the other boards.

So not only the ones it generates like minus 12 plus 12, minus 5.2 but 105 volts, 80 volts, and all the spares 120 volts down here. And these are obviously just by the placement of them uh, voltage dividers for each and every one of those incoming voltages. And of course it's getting those uh, from the uh, the main backplane and the other boards. so it's doing monitoring of all those.

It also monitors and controls all of uh, the um, the impulse uh, respond like the pulses and things like that. so it can like stop and in case there's a like a day like an overload or uh, you know, anything like that. it really is, uh, quite intelligent. It's not just a power supply board, and it does self-testing and uh, diagnosis stuff as well.

And there's you know, look, there's tons of test points up here. There's even like data points where you can presumably hook like a logic analyzer up to, you know, D0 through to D7 read write. so they've practically got like the entire bus up there. high voltage, dc fail, for example, uh, slot Ids and you know it really is quite smart.

It's doing a heck of a lot this board and as is common, even though the user can't see them if you take the front panel off, of course you get some Leds lead indicators on the front that can just you know make sure like the analog board's okay and the you know the master and all sorts of other modules are all doing fine. So yeah, that does a heck of a lot of controlling. Nothing too fancy down here. On the power supply part, They've just got some local linear rigs down here and it looks like we've got a switching transformer there like you know, no big deal and some input protection down there.

Oh, look at that baby, that's that's actually enormous. That's a big ass mob. And all the large caps on this board and on the other boards are all our mark on brand and you wouldn't have heard of these 105 degrees. Thank you very much for playing.

Uh, you wouldn't have heard of these after about the mid 90s because Marcon were actually a subsidiary of Toshiba. So these are essentially Toshiba capacitors. but they were. Marcon was bought out by Nippon Chemicon in the mid 90s.

So yeah, these are top class caps. but they've got some sprag jobbies as well. You know, I'm a sprag fan boy and absolutely no surprises for finding mod wires on these boards and little mods. Look, they've got some resistors up there that's absolutely fantastic.

Uh, because when you, uh, you know there's so much engineering that goes into uh, designing systems like this and you know things like crop up over time when you're testing. so you might have started, uh, you know, designing this board and then testing the board on its own and it might have been okay for example. But then when you start testing it with the rest of the system, you go, oh, can it do this? can it do that And you start adding stuff. You don't really want to re-spin boards because these things aren't high volume production.

So really, you know it's It's not much or over over the years, you might have been using board for several years and then you wanted to, you know, tweak something. uh, you know, add some capability or something like that so it's easier just to uh, mod these things than it is, Uh, to relay out the whole board because you might have, you know, had a whole run of these and they cost a fortune. Once they're assembled and tested, you put a lot of value. Add into these, uh, types of boards.

This one's just got power stuff, let alone like more complex stuff with really expensive silicon on it. So yeah, no surprises whatsoever. That's a multi-layer jobby, of course. How many layers I hear you ask? Well, the Pcb designer was thoughtful enough to put a layer identifier One, two, three, four of course.

so you've got to read it from the other side. Seven. It's not going to be an odd number, so it's going to be at least eight. We'll have to get the rest of that off to see it.

and yep, looks like it stops at eight. So hands up if you're a Pcb designer and uh, they wanted you to lay out this, uh, large board. it's power supply. How many layers you're going to need? I might need four.

You know, it's got a bit more, maybe six. but you know, do you need eight? Yeah, probably not. but you know why not. Cost is no object here.

It really doesn't matter. Our rats do not install resistors within dashed lines. and sure enough, there's one with a dashed line. And sure enough, there's no resistor in there.

But what's that little dot in the middle of that that is actually a dollop of glue there that goes under every one of these Smt components on the bottom of the side of the board? 1206s by the way. Now that 0402 rubbish that holds the components down when you do your, you know, for double-sided a load so that they'd fall off when you reflow the other side of the board. And there it is. Because sometimes gravity is A and I really like to show you what, uh, brick they're using.

but these, like, I think there's like thermal adhesive on there and it's just not coming off. So um, even with the clips undone. So yeah, sorry. this is the digital supply board and um, you might be surprised.

You might think it's generating different rails, but it's not. Apparently this one does 5 volts and that's it. So obviously, um, multiple converters used in parallel here, so you know, just like spreading the heat across these. So obviously, uh, there was some expansion capability here for another set of uh, three, uh, converters here and you can see it.

like the you can tell by the green there, that's just one large copper poor and there's a five volt test point smack on it. And here's the arse end of it. here. You can see lots of huge copper fill.

They didn't really waste any space in here at all. It's a four layer jelly. None of that eight layer rubbish. Um, but yeah.

obviously like there's a little bit of control on there because this is not always. This is not on at power up. Um, this is actually turned on on under software control and this supplies 5 volts to the entire card cage, which includes all the other boards. So that's why it's got to be pretty beefy.

because there's a ton of five volt uh, you know, ttl uh type stuff running this whole shebang. This one's slightly more interesting. It's the analog power supply and it provides plus minus 6 volts plus minus 15 volts plus minus 80 volts and 0 to 105 volts. I presume that is an adjustable output.

So yeah, slightly more interesting. but you know a lot of these will actually be contained in these, uh, switching modules in here. But interestingly, these have, like, uh, they've got some extra shielding on these. They've got the copper tape.

Check that out. Looks like that goes all the way under the module and back over to the other side of the heatsink there. And of course, uh, that would be, uh, strapped, uh, to a ground. You know, shield ground at least Now we've seen a couple of these, uh, giant mobs.

Uh, 275 L40s here. They're just enormous. So we've got a, uh, symmetrical high voltage switching converter up here. Look at the symmetry in there, look at these nice angled traces.

Um, big switching transformer. Then over here, we've got some beefy looking diodes up there. Wow. they're enormous.

Uh, is that a bridge and then once again, some nice classic mod in here. topside modding. and uh, they've come. a guts are there and they've tied them over to, uh, these resistors over here.

so I'm not sure what it's doing. But and as before, a whole bunch of uh, test points right along the uh, top of this board. up here you can access from outside so you can you know you don't need like an extender card or something like that. You can come along and diagnose the faults on these things pretty easily.

They've got some, you know, custom jobbies up here, just cable tied down and uh, wired in. They look a bit how you're doing, but uh, it gets the job done. And if we check the back side here once again, this one's a six layer board they're certainly not a fan of. uh, straight tracers? Are they look at that running higgledy piggledy? Ugh.

I can't stand it. It'll bug me anyway. Um, some. yeah.

Look at that. some serious modding down there with these, uh, insulated wires that just join in those pins Up to what? to these ones over here? Why? Like they're well, there are. you know they're signal, uh, traces. You can see it buggering off up here like this.

Um, so it's not power. So anyway, oh, that could be a remote sense or something. Maybe they bodged. ah, maybe that's it.

Maybe they botched in a remote sense. They might have goofed up the the layout there. perhaps. um, but it's just.

uh. you know, I think that'll bug me if the traces are like that. Give me my 45 90s please. Now we get to the more interesting stuff.

This is the analog interface module, the Aim and this is where we kind of have to get into the block diagrams of these things and it does change. This is the acquisition subsystem. It does change depending on the like configuration. But here's our analog interface module here.

goes back and forth between the Um S H and that's that front board that we see with all the uh, all the connectors which go out to the actual ultrasound heads here. and it's got external foot switch for our control. and so this is the Uh Scan head module select so you know it's those relays, just uh, it's I believe that's all they're doing on there. We might have a look at that one.

Um, and it's just basically uh switching. Uh, the different Uh array heads on the front end so it's basically just a marks Yeah, it sends out, it reads stuff back and then it bugs off to uh, an internal Rf a bus which should be on the Uh backplane in there, and then it goes into the process. In a whole pro, There's much more than what you see here as we'll get into Um in essentially the second half of this video because those boards are showing you so far. Um, in the front, there's a whole another whole set of them in the back.

Anyway, other stuff we've got the Fec's the front end controller and the Dop that's the Uh doppler mod doppler acquisition module. Okay, so what the analog interface module does? Um, quite a few things. As you can see, it's got some digitally uh control stuff. These are our gals down here.

They might just be doing some address decoding and things like that, but you know it's got a fair bit of a little surface mount. uh, miscellaneous control stuff. But basically what it does is it's going to generate a two-stage Tgc control signal. What Tgc is is time gain compensation signal and I might have to link in like an article on time gain uh, compensation.

But it's basically an ultrasound imaging technique that adjusts for the changes in the Uh, the echoes caused by variations in the beam forming, Uh techniques of these sorts of things. And and beamform is quite a complicated subject. And how you actually get the reflections by how you form the beams, how you get the reflections back, and how you process and analyze them and all sorts of stuff. So this is what a good lot of this hardware in this beast is going to be doing.

It has involved, uh, the acoustics of beamforming, so Tgc is effectively doing compensation of attenuation and diffraction amplitudes of the received beam forming signals and stuff like that. Anyway, it also does a digital to analog conversion of the Tgc signals as well. and this is also the board that controls the relays on that Uh front end as well. and it also generates the 240 megahertz Uh system oscillator clock.

So that's got to be under here somewhere because I don't really see any 240 meg uh, crystal oscillator there. So yeah, something's happening under here. We'll poke under the hood in a minute and this board also measures uh temperatures coming from the scan heads as well. So they've got uh, you know, thermistors or whatever and they're using to sense the Uh temperature in there and that's uh, being processed by this board just to make sure you know there's no overloads and things like that.

and it also does some high voltage or supplies. high voltage probably switches it through. I don't know if there's any additional generation over here than on the Uh boards we saw before, but anyway, let's crack this open and we do that by going on the back here because you know, just a bunch of passives on the back. But yeah, anyway, this is an eight layer Jobby and for all you Rf braid aficionados, there you go.

look at that. A little bit of uh corrosion on the end here, but she'll be right. No worries. So let's lift this off.

that's come off. so this one's going to come off today. I've got a few mod wires, just the passes. We've been mooned.

What we want is good stuff. On the other side, there's our oscillator. Well, there's not really a huge amount doing on there at all. is there? I mean, yeah, there it is.

Sure enough, 240 meg uh system oscillator there that just looks like, you know, joe vlogs. Nothing uh, that fancy there. um no. like ovenized oscillator or anything.

but you know it could be like a uh, temperature, uh, compensated jobby. But yeah, like there's not much else. like another gal over here and some uh nut semi parts in there. But apart from that, geez, you know all that and all that shielding, that's it.

It's quite a disappointment. And check out our front end controller board. Isn't it gorgeous? I just love seeing like densely packed digital like this. And the chips, uh, all in there.

Like all like all in rows lining up and they're all going to be in the same orientation as well if you notice carefully. like pin one is always in the same spot. No higgledy piggledy or anything like that. You've got occasional the ones that are running horizontal with the memory.

um and stuff like that. But yeah, it's just. ah, it's gorgeous. I love it.

You know I'm a digital guy. anyway. um, it looks. I once again, I don't think this is a bus bar going across because you you don't need it.

This is a 12 layer board. Unbelievable. 12 layers. I don't know.

I would have thought I'd get away, maybe with a bit less for this, you know. But anyway, um, once again, costing doesn't matter and we've got an Intel processor down here. I'm not sure which one I'd have to get that, uh, heatsink off there. but uh, they've got a nut semi.

I don't know what that's doing, so that's some other sort of processing. you know is, didn't Didn't that semi do? uh, Dsps and things like that. um I don't know. But anyway, um, once again, like uh, front panel test points? Again, front panel leads.

Front panel Test points. These are actually uh, two millimeter probes so you can stick your multimeter probes into there. Absolutely brilliant. Some sort of uh, reset button and something else, but just a ton of digital goodness on this.

So yeah, I mean, you know, you could have whacked that all in one Fpga these days, but uh, no. back? then. Do it discreet, No worries. So there's the backside of this bad boy.

There's nothing, uh, serious doing there. and they've got, uh, an extra flood fill just around this section, so they might be doing some uh, analogy type stuff around there. Sure enough, that's to do with this stuff down here. So if you want to go down and take a look at those, by all means, go for it.

I'm not going to go into any detailed analysis of any parts on this board or any I I don't have like a block, uh, diagram for this thing. Unfortunately, all I've got is a description of what it does and basically what this bad boy does. It basically provides real-time control of the front end doing transmit, receive, and all the beamforming functions. So it's controlling all the other beastie stuff that we're going to be seeing on the other boards and it uh interfaces uh with the main cpu uh, which is a 68040 I believe, um, via Scip bus.

uh. and it determines scanning sequences and modes and you know all that sort of jazz. and it provides timing signals for transmit and receive cycles and all that sort of stuff. And it also sends all the Uh scan head operating parameters as well.

So I guess those scan heads are uh, you know, reasonably smart. or at least you know, some smart section control of it. Anyway, and it generates all the system bus timing because this entire system has many different buses. The bus interfaces are Sc, Si, uh, we've got Fep, We've got the clock.

Uh, we've got the Shc, the Tgc we talked about. Uh, before the Rf bus, the R You know radio frequency, but they call it the Rf bus. Um, there's a T tag bus. no idea what they're in.

there's a front end controller bus, there's a synchronization bus, there's an Sc bus or whatever that is, and there's a scan bus. So yeah, that's why we need all of these pins. and you'll yes, and yes, you'll notice if you look carefully, they're not soldered because these are press fit. And we've gone to five rows here because as I said, we're going to generate all of those buses.

and uh, yeah, look, we've got five times 95 pins on this bad boy. And as you can see, they're not soldered. they are press fit. And I can assure you that they are super duper reliable and I've seen this on other boards as well.

They often have writing on the connectors like this. so um, well, that is the people that tested these things. Uh, presumably or somebody was you know, mod in them or something like that. perhaps? Dunno, you know that's obviously a date there 11, 97 and I know everyone came here to see this.

These are one of eight. They're all identical, so I only got one out. These are the channel boards so these control uh, the transmit and receive of the Um ultrasound sensors, the multi-array ultra sound sensors. So this is just one channel.

so um, yeah, there's a lot of Vlsi action going on here Mhs. I've got no idea. These are obviously a custom like beam forming processing type A6 and if we have a look down here, you can actually see the labeling on this. It's got Phsd, Linear, and Cw.

So these have to do with the Uh sensor head or scan header as they call them we're talking about. You know these things here, which they They stick the ultrasound gel on the end of that and they whack that on your uh, you know, the back of your knee. or they whack it on your tummy or whatever. and they've got different Uh types of sensor heads.

This one is a curved array. Um, because it's there it is. It's curved. So Phsd is a phased array so you can get a particular type of uh, like a phased array head and and they use that for cardiac and abdominal uh stuff.

and um, obstetrics uh type stuff. and that's typically uh. in the order of uh, two to four megahertz. got 64 elements and 90 degree field of view for that and the linear head.

Here this is a higher frequency one. uh that's basically used for like a you know, smaller scale stuff like vascular and you know, other like veins and things like that. um and that works at uh four to seven megahertz. it's got a 38 millimeter field of view.

this particular sensor had any does anyway with 128 elements and Cw stands for continuous wave and you can like you can use multiple sensor heads with different Uh types of actuation too I believe. But yeah, these basically just mean like different Uh frequencies and processing options for various different heads you can get. So this board you know you might put in different boards if you need uh, some specific Uh requirement for some you know with us scan head that you've got. So yeah, I believe this is going to uh support up to 128 channels but I could be wrong.

I don't have exact uh details and I have no idea who Mhs is. um the company that developed this, um you know. So yeah, I look, I don't know, it's beam forming processing and also and everything else that goes along with that and well yeah, that's not the purpose of this video. I'm sure lots of uh you know, ultrasound and beamforming experts and everything can jump in and possibly tell us what's going on here.

But yeah, it's doing all the heavy processing, heavy lifting, and of course these days you'd probably do this in like Fpgas and stuff like that. Um, but you know back then, No, they had just dedicated. You know, we're talking mid 90s. We're talking like you know, 25 years ago? This is probably designed 30, you know, coming on 30 years ago now.

So yeah, it's It's pretty old school, so Fbgas weren't that grunty back then. So yeah, custom asics were the way to go for doing a beamform in really heavy duty processing. Although, Fpgas are perfect for beamforming because they could do multiple parallel processing and all that sort of stuff. So which is what you need for beamforming? We did beam foreign underwater sonar stuff and yeah, we were using Fpgas back in the day and things like that.

But for this application? um, no. they've rolled their own custom A6 here. We got one look at that. that poor little capacitor that's Kamagatsa.

Um, that's that's spilled. its magic smoke. Look at that. Wow.

Yeah, so that was a some sort of bypass cap and it's just. yep. it's shorted out and just just fried itself. And of course, I've done a whole series of videos on that, haven't I? So there you go.

That's what's um, happening on the under. the shield under there. and that's obviously. uh, the receivers.

It's a micronics. Part 94. Uh, 20th week 94 Date code. By the way, if you're dating these sorts of things, it's a 20.

It's you know, it's some sort of custom. uh, you know, this has to be the receivers. Like I don't know. analog to digital converters, something like that.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised at the lack of power stuff on here. I mean, you know, there really isn't um anything. So this is basically, um, it's just receiving stuff. The only power stuff we've got under here.

It's a bunch of power transistors under here. like, um, I I presume. I'm not going to take them all out, but one, two, three, four. um, but I yeah, so that's all we've got.

that's all that's doing. Um, so the rest of it's all, uh, you know, reception? Well you know, of course you gotta transmit the uh, ultrasound, but uh, the all the tricks in the uh, multi-channel processing and beamforming and uh, reception of course. But yeah, I'm I just like expected to see like you know, a huge number of channel. like 64 channels of like power electronics or something.

but yeah, that's it. So anyway, if I could find like a block diagram of how the head works and things like that, I'll link it in and this is an eight layer board for those who are keeping count. and uh yeah, no, nothing on the bottom there. just uh, there's a couple of little sot-23s um, but yeah, nothing really doing just to sort of, uh, all passive and onto the disk drive module which is the only one that's uh, fully shielded here.

And it's also got our Ecg and other uh, analog outputs as well. And we're in. And we'll check out this in a second because it's got some interesting stuff. Um, but we've got ourselves.

Uh, there's the hard drive Ibm. Thank you very much for playing. Do you see the Ibm's anymore? Do you? Fantastic. There's the Magneto optical drive.

Look at the big Rf fingers on there, like that. Absolutely beautiful. So I'm not going to go like tearing down magneto optical drives and stuff like that. Anyway, let's have a look at this board.

Our first use of Hot Snot down here. We haven't seen the the old hots not used anywhere else yet anyway. Uh, they're Nichikon caps of course. Um, geez, what are they.

Oh those bad boys. giant surface mount inductors. Look at those. Wow.

here. we've got some Op-497s that'd probably be, uh, precision Op-amps Look at those nice big big wide caps on there. Ad630 in original dip package. Thank you very much.

Beautiful! So this is all our analogy goodness. And yeah, this is actually on the uh disk drive and this is the disk drive board. They've got a bunch of these analog signals and you know Ecg stuff and things like that. But look at the most interesting part of this is the giant cutout.

Here you can see how all the analog stuff has its own isolated ground plane going around here and look at the distance in here where they're chopped out there. Look at this, a burr brown isolator? look at that. oh that is just gorgeous. and a power convertibles to Dc converter here.

The isolation in this is like what is it? You know, two and a half kilovolts or something. Absolutely enormous. But of course it has to be because look where it comes from. This is like our the Ecg probe here.

So of course you know you hook this up to a human in a hospital. And yeah, that's the isolation you want. Fantastic. But you can all come a gut.

So with that cap there, um, you know you want a top quality cap in there. There It is for those playing along at home. But yeah, that's just gorgeous isolation. Have you ever seen anything as good as that? Oh beautiful Bobby Dazzler.

So to me this is one of the most interesting boards in this thing. It's just gorgeous. and oh, some of the stuff you can salvage from there. Fantastic.

Now I've got to figure out how to get inside all of these uh, processing boards in here. Um, because there is a whole bunch of them. And on the side here we've got some uh, interface connectors. We've got uh, there's hard copy and there's Scip and there's Vcr which is the video cassette recorder.

um for those old school people and we're in like flind at the back part of it. and uh, once again, you can see all the braided shielding around the outside. Wow, You know they're really serious about this sort of stuff, but you know they're used in medical environments and things like that. Oh, a little bit rusty the shaft there.

But anyway, check it out. We've got a whole bunch of processing goodness here, so I'll get all those boards out. I'll take those back to the lab and we'll check them out because yeah, there's a whole bunch of processing, but this will all be digital stuff now. I won't be getting these out, but hopefully you can see down in there some really big ass filters.

sorry Light here is terrible, but yeah, those big cans down there. I reckon they're gigantic mains filters, so that wouldn't surprise me for something that's uh, designed for, you know, use in a hospital. So yeah, we're nowhere near finished here. We have another whole bunch of like half a dozen boards in the rear of this machine.

If you thought it okay, all the analog stuff just got fed into the processor and then it just displays it like a regular Pc. Nope, you're mistaken. We have pixel space processors and interface modules and image average display translators, sample space processors, and all sorts of stuff. So oh geez, where do we start? Let's go to the peripheral interface module.

but before that, we need to have a look at the block diagram of the display subsystem. So what we have here, this is our peripheral interface module which we're going to look at Now I'm doing them in no particular order. Now this peripheral interface module we're going to look at now. This does encoding and decoding of Ntsc and power stuff, It does system video syncing and it controls various other stuff like external hard copy and things like that the Vcr.

Then we've got the internal interconnect module over here. this does our audio buffering and interconnects and with the monitor devices and things like that. And then we've got the pixel space processor which does scan conversion, zooming of things uh, static and scrolling graphics and and it can freeze our stuff as well. Because all that stuff is not done in the processor, it's actually uh done in actual hardware and then put directly onto the display.

The processor just does You know other like menu and os uh, types of stuff. Most of the actual ultrasound information you see on the screen is done in actual dedicated hardware. Being dumped directly to the monitor may not be like that on like more modern ultrasounds of course processes these days modern processors have more enough grunt to do this sort of stuff. But yeah, you know, like we're talking like 25 to 30 years ago.

Yep, you did all in discrete hardware. And then the Pcm is a pixel conversion module that uh that actually controls the actual uh user interface. a window for the X Windows operating system. It does grayscale and color.

uh stuff. It converts non-interlaced 50 60 Hertz to 30 25 for various things and uh, gray and color bar generators as well, just for testing. So the peripheral interface module, as I said, uh, encodes and decodes Ntsc and Pal video. Um, and does system video sync and you know, not much else.

So this is basically it's just a video conversion board, really? And I won't go into much detail on here. We've obviously got uh, some opto coupler stuff. You can see the split in the ground plane right along the middle there. Um, you know, it's got the various outputs and stuff like that.

So they're all, uh, optically isolated. And yes, no surprises for finding Philips parts inside here because uh, Phillips do a like Sony, Uh, for example, do tons of their own, uh, custom Asics over the years. And of course, Phillips. Uh, this is copyright 1991.

So obviously, uh, they were uh, Atl at the time who designed this they actually contracted would have Maybe unless they're off the shelf. Um, would have used Uh Phillips. Either they contracted them for this or it's probably an off-the-shelf part. Yeah, it's probably an off-the-shelf It's an Saa.

They're probably doing this for all sorts of apps. I don't think they're uh, custom at all. But anyway. Yep, Phillips would have been very well avail.

Very well aware of Atl. that's why they bought them in the mid 90s. So this is technically a Phillips Ultrasound. but uh, back then it wasn't it was an Atl.

But yeah, there you go. Got an Intel Joby down here and that's an 82 C152 I think. did we see that on the other board as well? But and as usual, nothing doing on the back. And this bad boy is the pixel conversion module.

And as I said, this controls are like the display window in in the X Windows operating system. grayscale and color. uh, lookup tables apparently. and it converts.

you know, 50 60 Hertz stuff. And there's a whole bunch of memory, a whole bunch of Vs Vlsi custom Asics in there. the platypus asic. There you go.

um, 1995 Vintage. Got some bad boy analog devices Dsp up there, and what else. Um, you know, just a whole bunch of discrete logic. Got another uh, Tms processor down there and what's the 340 X and I think that's a Dsp is it? Hmm.

Anyway, um. nat semi down here. the St Nick. um the network interface controller.

is that the like the inner? that wouldn't be the Ethernet interface. No, no, it's not a nick. Anyway, that is a lot of hardware just for you know, displaying the image in a window basically and doing some you know color and scan conversion and stuff. and the usual backside.

And this is the Pixel Space Processor. as I said, does scan conversion, zoom in of the ultrasound window. It does scroll and graphics. it does.

You know if you want to freeze it, hit the freeze button and do freeze display and stuff like that. So obviously you know a ton of memory to like. Hold it all in there. and you know we've got quite a lot of uh, Xilinx Fpga action down here.

Wow. These Xc3190as. Wow. Anyone remember those? Geez, that's really old-school Can you even buy them these days? I'm not sure.

how long do they, uh, keep these sort of things in production for? I don't know. and Idt up there. That'd be, uh, probably like some Fifo memory or something. Id2.

idt do some of the best Fifo memory. And then we got some Raytheon Asics. What the hell are Raytheon doing in here? Anyone know Beulah Bueller. But once again, a remarkable amount of hardware there and you love being mooned.

That's all she wrote. Oh, by the way, that's a 10 layer board. I forgot to look at the other ones, but yeah, 10 layers spread, no expense. And this bad boy is the sample space processor.

And this one does Ffts and doppler color imaging and sampling. I like all sorts of stuff to do with the actual like the really grunty stuff in the actual uh display. So um, yeah, look at all the analog devices Dsps. I mean, have you seen that many Dsps on a board before? Um, that's insane.

Anyway, we have our first Atl branded chips down here, so they've done some custom Asics down there. I'm not too sure who Ami is or is that Amis? I'm not sure. the logo if you do know, uh, offhand, leave it in the comments down below. But yeah, basically.

yeah, we've got some memory there and not much else but that that is doing a lot of Grunty Dsp, Fft, and Sample Space processing. I don't know. Ten layers. Again, thanks for playing And we're not done on the advanced processing yet.

This is the advanced if output or intermediate frequency output and this does synthetic Aperture stuff and Rf quadrature down conversion into your Inq signals and like, wow, it's yeah, it's a beast. So lo Vlsi, Lsi, they just got a ton of hardware in here. It's absolutely amazing. What are those ceramic jobbies? Don't know them? There's just no end to the amount of processing you have to do to get one of these ultrasound machines working and the modern ones that don't use dedicated hardware like this.

They still have to do all this so they're still probably doing it in. you know, big ass Fpgas and stuff like that instead of a whole bunch of uh, you know, like lower end, lower ending quote marks. uh, Ac hardware 10 Layer Joby Again, and this one here is actually two boards. although I'm not sure if they're actually, uh, related.

This one is the image memory module. and of course, it's just got a whole bunch of memory and a whole bunch of gals up here for interfacing and that's it. But it's actually physically, uh, connected into the middle frame of this one. So it actually this one had two screws in it and it just it held this board in place.

So maybe that's why they're physically, uh, next to each other. Anyway, this is the adapter 2. so this doesn't appear to be the Cpu board. We've got a It's probably just like the image display engine.

perhaps. It's got a couple of big analog devices Dsp ceramic jobs, a couple of Lsi's up here, a couple of, uh, large Altera Plds, Fpgas, and a couple of those uh, Intel processors. one there, and one up there. so hey, I don't know.

I can't find any info on it. And there's an interesting little, uh, revision resistor network there. so the Cpu can read that resistor network. You know, pull up, pull down.

or maybe the value. I think it's just a binary thing. Up or down. Just pull up or pull down.

and Bob's your uncle. Hang on a sec. You remember our pixel Space Processor 2. Electric Boogaloo? Um, well, there's Pixel Space processor 1 I guess.

Um, and they are very different beasts once again. Um, we've got this, uh. graphics, uh. processor like graphics co-processor uh kind of thing.

Uh, the Ti Jobby. Um, the Intel processors. and yeah, all the regular stuff and all the memories. So anyway, tada Cpu time.

This is our last board and this is a Motorola 68040. For you Motorola fanboys, they all go wild. It's under there thermal adhesive. I'm not gonna, uh, bothered to take it off.

and I've got old school Sim modules up here. Um, Sim bios, logic? I don't know what that is. Um, Beulah Bueller? Uh, then we've and I didn't know St did, uh, lithium? um backup battery like srammy real time clock or whatever it is. Um, things like uh, Dallas semi? I didn't know St did that.

and then we just got a whole bunch of others at a Cypress job down there. actel, uh, Fpga or actor where I tell doing Fpgas back then. I'm not sure Maybe it's a Cpld type thing and a bunch of Vlsi type stuff and another Intel chipsety thing. But there you go.

that's the main processor running. Uh, Vx works. And because this video is already like 50 minutes long, I'm not going to include a uh, destructive teardown on one of these heads. If I get around to it, I'll put it.

Oh, if you want it, give it a big thumbs up. if you want to, um, see inside one of these bad boys and I can get out the uh dremel for that. but I'll whack that on the second channel. Subscribe to Eev blog too.

Gonna hit. like probably a hundred thousand subs and get my silver uh play Button award for this second channel. Um, anyway, it's going Gangbusters over there. So yeah, I'll leave that for another time.

So there you go. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Sorry about the length, but I do like to waffle on about these things. And yeah, you can see the amount of engineering effort that's gone into an ultrasound like this, all the beam forming technology, and all the stuff that goes along with doing that with all, uh, you know, and I'm not going to say no, it's not all discrete hardware, but you saw those boards.

Tons of discrete, uh, logic, plus tons of asics to do anything. Co-processors galore. I mean, how many like Intel processors were inside this thing? Like I don't know. Like, I think it's just, you know.

Absolutely crazy the complexity of this thing with front and back boards in the back of the system. This is why the whole thing weighs so much. It's a hundred, just bare bones. It's 170 kilos, but when you include, uh, some of the other stuff on it, it's closer to 200 kilos.

This thing weighs. and what's that pound for you yanks? I don't know. So these things are enormously complex. It'd be really interesting to actually compare it with like a real modern one that's only been designed in the last five years.

But as I said, this one's uh, was made 25 years ago, so it would have been designed probably closer to 30 years ago now, so only seems like yesterday. But yeah, really remarkable technology back then, but they'd be doing all the same stuff these days. it'd just be, you know, more consolidated uh, hardware and stuff like that, because you know things have gotten a bit better in the last 30 years. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed that and found it useful.

If you did, please give it a big thumbs up. As always, comment down below and over on the Eev blog forum where everyone discusses all the videos and as always Library Channel and I got bit shoots and I've got uh, you know, I've got Twitteries and I've got Instagrammies and all sorts of stuff. Catch you next time.