Hi, welcome to Tear Down Tuesday Got a real high-end bit of kit for you today. Here we go: It's the Agilant 8160, a pulse function arbitrary noise generator or more affectionately known as the P Fang or maybe just Fang with a silent P Who knows Hm. Anyway, it's a really nice bit of Kit We're talking about $20,000 worth here. and this one.

It's got an optional 66 megabit patent generator as well. Worth another six grand. I'm going to like this one. Oh yeah, here it is the 81 60a it's labeled as a 350 SL500 MHz pulse function arbitrary generator but it does noise as well and give you a quick sweep across the front panel here.

Very very nice look at those gold BNC Connectors are just ooes high performance and of course it's got the obligatory knob and this particular unit has options. dou2 and 6602 means it's the two channel unit and 660 means it's got the 660 uh Meg bit per second uh patent generation option which I believe is a uh, possibly a firmware uh option, but don't quote me on that. By the way, this thing is uh designed in Agilant uh German facility and they wanted me to check it out. so thank you guys for uh, sending me this one to pull apart.

and yes, we'll eventually get around to uh, playing with it. but this is just a tear down and the other options on the rear 10 MHz uh reference output I'm not sure the specs of that, whether it's oven oven stabilized or anything like that, but you can hook an external 10 MHz reference in. You could come from like a As Stratum 1 GPS reference or something like that Rubidium reference if you really wanted to. And it's got uh, two different modulation inputs and here we got two USBS and a land connection and good old Gpib.

Can't forget that, but still got the plug on there I Don't think anyone's ever used it. and I do like instruments with these rubber boots surrounding them like that so you can just take those off and should get access to the screws underneath. That's really quite neat. I Like it.

So we got a bunch of screws on the back. It looks like possibly this, uh, top cover here is just going to lift uh off if I take these screws off. Maybe. Anyway, only one way to find out.

Well, it's not going to, uh, budge off. It looks like maybe the uh, nice carry handles are carry straps either side are holding it down so looks like we're going to have to take these off. Possibly they might have something to do with it and it feels like it's going to come off. All right, let's lift the hood on 20,000 bucks worth of function.

gen. it's going to slide off Taada! Woohoo! And I've got to say my first impressions are Wow! You really are getting your money's worth here. The engineering at first glance looks absolutely phenomenal. Look at this processor board here.

all of these uh, uh, DC to DC converter modules. tons of them Lambda power supply and look at this huge heat sink on this, uh, clearly like a large BGA device under there and I love the fan mechanism here and the uh, duck in the duckin' mechanism. It's just great. We'll check it all out in more detail, but I think yeah, it's one of these uh, spare, no expense engineering designs.

Now let's start by looking at these: DC to DC converter modules. Clearly, the Uh design team have gone. we couldn't be bothered spending our time working on. you know, a power supply DC to DC converter We just use an off-the-shelf module.

clearly uh, decided to uh, put them or use separate modules and they've used them quite a few times here. Let's have a look one, 2, 3, four of those and this one here is slightly different to all the others above it. Here it uses a coil Tronics uh Transformer there that Pro Maybe it's a custom device I don't know, but it's got a part number on it I'll have to look that one up and then it looks like they've duplicated a couple of these 1, 2, 3, four, at least five further up under there. and I was right.

They haven't bothered to uh, design their own. they've gone. oh what the hell, We need to spend our engineering time on better things so we'll just use Off the Shelf's Texas Instruments DC Todc converter module and that's what that is. It's a Pt8 T240 I knew it was familiar and I've used these uh TI uh brick DC to DC converters before and they save a ton of design time.

and I've actually got a couple of these uh, similar type of Uh modules and they take all of the guess workor out of Designing DC to DC inverter. somebody's already done it for you. And you know when you're designing a complex bit of Kit or you're uh, you know you're trying to meet a deadline or something like that. and if money is No Object as it probably uh, might be in a $20,000 function generator, you're just going to go.

oh what the hell. I'm not going to take the risk I'll just use an offthe shelf DC to DC converter module thank you very much. And these other little Uh modules here. Of course they have rolled their own, but uh, they've used, you know, top Notch components you use coil Tronics they've used linear technology switches and you can see the uh input fuse down the bottom.

There there it is and uh, they're just really neatly laid out and here's the other one up here. Oh, they've actually sprung for China but uh, otherwise you know, once again, linear technology stuff. They've spared no expense and these are nice little layouts. has obviously got room inside the device to actually, uh, well cut and paste.

all these multiple converters and why they need so many I'm not uh, 100% sure. probably for driving all the core voltages for this massive device under here. Perhaps maybe it uses like, you know, three or four different uh rails. At least there's another device under here.

and uh, they probably want to keep them separate as well. And as for the main Supply Once again, they Spar No spense. it's a TDK Lambda made in the UK It's an NV 175 and let's take a look at the specs here. We've got uh, looks like four channels of 12 VTS at 15 amps and one auxiliary uh 12vt 1 amp Channel What a beast.

And there's the IC Mains input filter. It would actually be a filter inside that can there and it's all nice and neat and tidy. Nice. uh, ground Spade connections there.

and also they've got a little Ferite there on the input leads and clearly this uh blue board is a pro. The main processor board and they've gone for a separate embedded processor. There's an AMD uh processor there I'm not sure what type I'm not going to lift the uh label on. there's an so dim connector and that's uh for all the world like it's an offthe shelf um, you know, embedded processor board.

so I'm not actually uh sure what it's uh, what it is or what it's running I can't find any part numbers on it, that label on the processor there didn't uh, turn up anything but uh yeah, they've just gone bugger it, We'll use an offthe shelf processor. Probably makes the software development a lot easier as well. And on the modulation inputs here, you can see two high quality Cotto read realiz they' probably be uh, shielded. sort of.

You know, going to a couple of Analog Devices chips. and from those two modulation inputs, we get some Analog Devices Ad 92 83. Nothing much doing there. they're just 8bit uh, 100 Meg sample per second adcs.

And here's what might be the key to the whole device. It's a UMC UMX 1113, D16 DG and it's an ultra low noise coaxial resonator as in ultra low phase noise. and uh, I'm not sure how much, uh, that puppy costs, but uh, it is probably the key to the uh, excellent uh Jitter performance. Um, and uh, you know, excellent performance of this function generator in general.

And right near that resonator. We've got an Ad 77 38 and that's an 8 channel 24-bit uh Sigma Delta analog to digital converter and either side of our huge uh, presumably Asic or something under this large seat sing either side of of those you can see a little BGA And what is it? It's an Analog Devices TX Dack. In fact, it's an Ad 9739 and that is a here we go. It's a 14bit 2.5 gig sample per second.

That's gig sample RF DAC And you can also see the serpentine tracers coming out of this device here under the heat sink right next to this one. And so that's an expensive deck. They've obviously got two of those, one for each. Channel And that's uh, $50 almost 50 bucks each in thousand of quantity right there.

And one thing I really like is this airflow duct here. They've formed it out of aluminium like this and it slopes right down there. and what it's designed to do is, um, take the air input from the sides here from both sides here, suck it under like this and then through the fans and then blows it out the bottom, through the heat sink. the main processor heat sink like this and then it blows over all the circuitry and comes out the back of the case through all that GR in there.

So it's just really nice. they've gone to a lot of effort there and they've integrated that main heat sink there with sort of, you know, with this aluminium plate as well, which uh, would also act um as part of the heat sink as well. It's great. I like it.

and I think this thing just, uh, sort of oozes that German engineering feel. you know, the German design division at Adelent they've You know, they've really spared no expensive this thing. and uh, all of the uh metal work too. By the way, they got multiple folded uh metal work inserts.

It's not just the one box with the board, just uh, stuck in there. There's multiple layers to this whole thing. it uh, really is, uh, quite a work of art. And if we take off this top strip here, see, you can see all the RFI prongs here to actually connect and get uh better.

RFI shield in to that plate there. and but they've got this. But check this out. they've got this uh, metal flap here going over this um flat Flex ribbon cable which looks like it goes to the uh front panel.

uh, keypad or uh, something like that. And here's some of the other circuitry on the front panel. and once again, they've got a TDK Lambda uh backlight uh supply for the Uh LCD backlight there. so you know, Spared no expense at all.

And there's an ISP 1521 that's a uh multi-channel USB controller and they've got a Zyink Xc95 288xl Cpld on here. uh, maybe that's the Uh display controller? Who knows. And here's something I haven't seen inside a bit of Agilant gear before. it's a microchip P 18 Lf4 Dou 5 18 series microcontroller.

go figure. And down in there, they've got a large Uh board to board interconnect to join the front panel through to the main board. and unfortunately to get all this ducked in metal work off, it looks like I'm going to have to actually take the whole thing apart. And like all the other metal work and and uh, you know to access the screws down in there to get that thing off.

So I don't really want to do that and uh, they agilant Were a bit hesitant for me to open this thing to begin with, but of course, um, the German Design Group should be very proud. This is beautifully engineered. I Love it and uh, of course you can't complain that uh, you're not getting your money's worth as far as the engineering goes, so you can see the other devices under there on the heat sinks. Really almost impossible to get the camera in there, but uh, looks like there's at least three, maybe four of them, uh little maybe.

uh BGA devices with heat sink stuck onto them. We'll call it, uh, quits for now. But anyway, I hope you like that. that's uh, a tear down of a $20,000 function generator and it's engineered as well as I would have expected.

So that's the agilant. German Design Group Awesome work guys and uh as always, if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the E blog uh forum and if you like tear down Tuesday and this video, please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time.