Well, the time has come. The $140,000 DSA 91304 a digital signal analyzer? Do youa eh? It's a scope. Um, the Infinium 13 GHz 40 gig sample per second scope. It's got to go back.

What? But you know what we say here on the Eev blog. Don't turn it on. Take it apart. Well, kind of.

eh. Now Agilant told me not to tear this thing down, but they didn't say I Couldn't at least take the main cover off, which was, uh, pretty darn easy. We should be able to see a few things through the vent holes in the side. Let's take a look at it and the first thing you notice is these absolutely enormous, uh, brushless fans on the side.

There they are. They're a uh Delta Electronics brushless DC fan made in China but they would be good quality ones. Um, but they, you know I mean the air flow in these things is massive. That's why it makes a huge amount of noise.

If you watch the uh previous video, you could see well, you could hear the uh, the noise in the background. Um, even picked up by my lapel mic. It really is that loud. and uh, there's not much to see through the fans unfortunately, just more.

uh, heat sink stuff. Um, but the other side's going to be more interesting Now if we have a look through the vent holes on the side here. there's the Bnc's on the front panels and they don't go directly into boards. they go into, uh, coaxis.

They'd be super duper high quality coaxes. We can see some sort of part number on there, but you can see the four channels um, and the uh, trigger, and uh, stuff like that over on the far side there and they go through. well, they don't. Yeah, they just go through a uh, a panel there, a metal panel through to the other side down in here, and I'll try and rearrange the light so that we can see in here.

But these coaxes, uh, basically go up to these boards. These two boards here directly into the hybrid modules down in there. Sorry about the focus, it's not the best. I'll try and get some better in a second and you can see them here.

The coax is coming up from the bottom directly from the input B and Cs and uh. two of them go up to two hybrid modules here. So these are the input uh, hybrids. say for channel one and Channel two? I'm not sure which is which doesn't matter.

They're all identical. They're two identical uh boards uh, handling two channels each. and the other two coaxes go into these two hybrid uh, frontend modules down in here and you can see the hybrid module in there. and that's what you're paying the huge dollars for.

Absolutely top dollar. You know that's where all the money. That's where all the magic goes. You can see some miscellaneous stuff, power supply stuff.

there's some chokes. they'd be powering those, but they would be identical. Uh. 13 Gig input amplifiers on those hybrid modules, going over to the memory under all those heat sinks.

at the far end. you might be able to see in there and hopefully you can see through there. you can see the other, the heat sinks of the Uh main memory devices and the Adcs and stuff on the far side of those hybrid modules there. Hopefully if that will, uh, that will focus in, you can see the it goes.

The board goes right over to The Far Side Um, right next to the fans over there. so it's it's a full width board for these two input channels. There goes all the way over right over to the fans over there and uh, this contains all of your Uh analog. um uh.

front end of course is in the hybrid module. Then it would go into the ADC and then that would be coupled to the memory. It would have all your clocks and there you go. That's a better view of the whole system board down in there and all of the magic is under those heat sinks.

So even if we could get in, all we'd see is a a bunch of Uh heat sinks there unfortunately, so it wouldn't be terribly exciting. Can we have a look at that device down in there? There's a Zyink Spartan, Fpga and uh, some other miscellaneous stuff all on that main board. But basically you've got two of those boards there, um, shared between uh two channels. So that's our four Channel scope.

and if you have a look in there, you can see some other right angle Bnc's coming from the bottom of. well, actually, no, sorry, it's the side um of this vertical board. I'll show you in a second and there they just go along the bottom to the back panel. there your 10 MHz reference in and out.

so you can see this vertical board here. It's like a back plane uh board. and you can see the highspeed interconnects down in there. So uh, the 28 C cards plus the main Windows processor board on top plug into this back plane board.

But it's more than just a more than just a back plane. It's got some, uh, serious circuitry on there hybrid or oscillator module or something like that. Um, and it's got some large heat sink devices. You can see the fan on the uh on the back of a, uh, large heat sink there.

But that main board there, um, actually has a fair amount. fair amount to do. Check out all that circuitry down in there. So that's um.

it basically seems to be a four-board system. You got that back plane board down in there. You've got your two ADC boards and your main processor board. and if you look at the top cover here, you can see they were even thinking when they designed this.

They put in these studs in here, press studs for the black pouch which goes on top which has matching uh, press studs on it so it uh, sits on the middle like that so they didn't have to, you know, stick it on with velcro or something ugly like that was designed into. um the you know, an integral part of the entire case for this thing. Really nice. And if you have a look at the side down here, they've even molded in these uh little feet to allow this thing to stand on the side so it doesn't interfere with the carry strap here.

um because the carry strap is lower recess slightly lower than these uh side things so it allows you to stand up on its side to get the screws out. and uh, well, I don't know, use a thing in that orientation if you wanted to. don't know why, but it just would have been mostly uh so that uh uh, you know, technicians could access the screws, flip it up on its side and access cuz there's screws along the bottom edge here that you have to undo as well as on the back to slide this cover off. So they're really thinking.

so let's lift the hood on this puppy and uh yeah, no, there's no, no, they're just, uh, not integral heat sinks. Here we go Tada And we're not going to touch anything inside, but it should at least give us a small Peak into what's inside this thing and on top light. Here you can just see some uh, riveted uh air guides in there which help uh, channel the air and stuff like that. It wouldn't be uh, for any other reason just to stop some air you know, blowing over the top of some other wall into some other part so you can direct the air through the system exactly where you need it.

uh, to maximize, uh, the cooling efficiency in this thing. cuz this thing is going to get damn hot. and here we go. Here's inside this thing.

It's got a uh A. It looks like a pretty much a standard um, uh, one of these compact uh form factor PC motherboards in here I'm not up with the latest PC motherboard standards and all that sort of stuff, but standard PCI uh slots with the uh, uh, back plane here and uh, some SATA connectors going off and uh, we got a main vertical Riser board in here going down to those two ADC boards. So here's a look at the PC motherboard and I don't know if they had it custom designed for them. There's the memory module standard um Power connector on it and uh, SATA connectors over there and uh, well, some more SATA connectors and the uh, that's a Gpib board, What type? It looks like it's some sort of custom agilant job perhaps I'm not sure I would assume so and uh, there's not much else uh to it.

I mean uh, there's the I Main's input filter and cable there that goes off to the main power supply which is around here and it's got instructions on how to remove the power supply. but I'm not absolutely not going to touch anything in this. This thing is worth $140,000 So there's a board on the uh front panel. It's got some uh, power supply stuff.

You can see those little uh, surface mount heat sinks down in there. so that's M mounted on the front panel. there's the uh, backlight, uh, inverter for the display. It's a dead giveaway.

There's another tiny little board down in there I'm not sure what that one's doing and this is actually really nicely system engineered. Take a look at that big right angle power connector there board to board connector which basically um, transfers all the power. By the looks of it, you can tell those big huge uh tabs on the back of it there that's a big whopping Blade Power connector. um that goes through to a right angle board on the power supply.

down in there you can see it. You can see the board down in there, so the power. So the power supply is in here. The 240 volts comes in here, does all the power conversion in behind here and then it uh, it pops out on that connector over on the main board and then the power from this uh, back plane board comes over to the main processor board.

So it's certainly not like an you know, an off-the-shelf power supply. It looks all totally custom designed and uh, a lot of engineering's gone into this. You can bet your bottom dollar and that's why these things are so darn expensive and they wouldn't sell many of these. I mean you know it's not just that, which makes it expensive, it's the big, uh, custom hybrid ADC front end modules and stuff like that.

Of course the're real highs speeed stuff, but if we have a look at the main board down in here actually I'll try and get some light in there and uh, see if we can improve that. All right, let's take a look at this uh, back plane board down here. you can see the right angle connector down in there going going to the um, uh, going over to the ADC board. but look at the layout of those bypass caps and all those Vas that is clearly a big ass BGA on that board.

There there we go, you can see all the all the vises in there. We got a Zyink Vertex 4 Fpga down in there, some sort of uh, hybrid module on the high side of that and uh, what else we got. just miscellaneous stuff, standard, so nothing much happening there. some chokes.

basically it's just a whole bunch of power supply stuff down in there. so that back plane uh, clearly is mainly power supply. but it does have a huge whopping BGA and vertex down in there for some sort of uh acquisition. well, some sort of uh processing something like that.

Uh, when you've got a device that huge, it's obviously doing something of massive importance. and my best guess of that. of course, given the proximity of these two Sida cables, clearly they're using Sida to get all of the data out of this thing. So that big BGA in there and uh, possibly that Vertex 4 next to it has um, you know is some sort of data serialization uh system which basically probably takes all the parallel data really highp speeded uh stuff from the main ADC and uh uh, main, uh, um, ADC capture boards and it's uh, taking and it's serializing that and putting it into the PC cuz this is, uh, basically the only way this machine gets the data is through those uh s ports.

I mean you know there's no other interface So Eventually it comes into the main processor and gets displayed on the screen via those SATA connectors there. So um, you know there is no direct uh. from that to the display, it's got to go through the SATA um serial link into the main uh Windows processor and then Windows displays it all. And if you can see that big board to board, interconnect down in there that big huge black block that is clearly the power going to the ADC board just by the sheer size of it there.

and uh, that would be using huge you know High current blade terminals just like, uh, going just like it went from the power supply to this main board. Um, and there's another signal one under that heat sink device with the fan down there so that'd be a really highe speed. um, that one down there. very high speed board to board into connect and a huge amount of power cuz we're talking many, many amps to Uh Power the Adc's and the hybrid front ends and the memory and all that sort of stuff working at 13 Gig.

with those hybrid modules down in there again, you can see that they're individually serial numbered and you can bet your bottom dollar. Rev 2 board. By the way, you can bet your bottom dollar. Those things are individually tested and characterized uh, most likely by some uh, wise old man with a gray beard, some RF wizard who uh, tweaks every one of those things um and characterizes their performance and none of them would make it in here unless they passed EX exhaustive testing.

You can see the connection method on the bottom there. It looks like there's some sort of BGA module or that could be like, you know, some ball grid array. Although I have a look under the bottom and see if I can see any pins. It's quite hard to get the camera in there, but you can see that there's additional circuitry on the bottom side of the board.

there. a ton of it actually. um, not. uh, huge stuff, just uh, uh, support stuff and they'd be bypass stuff and things like that.

but definitely, uh, double-sided of course. Um, you need that to get the bypass caps right on the uh, right on the modules themselves. but there's a ton of circuitry on the bottom there and those modules don't look to be through hole? of course they're uh, some sort of BGA system which helps with the signal Integrity sorry can't get a better view than that. So there you go I Hope you enjoyed a brief uh look inside.

$140,000 scope to see where you're getting your money's worth I'd love to be able to, uh, show you more on those ADC boards, but I'm definitely not going to take this thing apart. uh I was asked not to, but they didn't say I couldn't take the lid off of course. Um, so I haven't touched or prodded around inside there, so pretty darn sure it'll still work when I put the lid back on, but uh, as it so happens. Um, there's some more uh info and look at those hybrid modules in the Agilant uh data sheet so we'll take a quick look at that.

and here it is: if we have a look at the data sheet for this thing. um, the just the short form. uh, data sheet. They're obviously, uh, quite proud of its design and construction and the technology in here.

CU They tell you all about it There it is. engineered for unmatch, realtime measurement accuracy. Use your Jitter budget in your design, not on your oscilloscope Yes, which means it's ultra low. Jitter And if we have a look here, they even give you a nice look at the Hybrid module.

here. you can see inside there. Unfortunately, it's a little bit. uh, that's as far as I can zoom in.

There's no more resolution in that uh thing. anyway. I don't think, but you can see the hybrid module. You can see the uh balls on there of course.

and uh, that's it's really a nice bit of work. I Mean there's a whole lot of RF magic which goes into that. You know how many, um, work hours would have gone into producing that? I Don't know how big the team would have been, but if you want to know where your money goes in $140,000 osilloscope. a good lot of it is in just in this hybrid module and the highp the highspeed custom Adcs which are next to it and we can actually scroll down here and take a look at those.

They're the hybrid modules as we saw and there was that uh uh, Fpga Zink Fpga device. You remember, we were looking from the top side here, so we were looking from the top side down into it and we had the coaxes coming up over into there like that. and they're the two hybrid modules. So you've got your 13 gig signal directly from the coax into here into the uh, hybrid front end and then directly into your analog to digital converter here.

Wh? there it is. Sorry, it's a little bit tricky analog to digital converter. Then there's the memory. Highspeed Memory Control.

Roll it for the sampling and then the acquisition memory. the massive amount of acquisition memory and that's just not standard stuff. that'll all be custom. Prime spec stuff.

You're paying top dollar for that. So there you go. That's a uh. They give you a decent look at the board there.

I Really like that You can see the connectors on the side here, so that's almost as good as taking the thing out and you can see it's pretty much all in these custom devices as you saw, there was circuitry on the bottom uh as well. just uh, support stuff, bypass stuff, and miscellaneous stuff like that. But yeah, it is serious business and that's why this stuff. Um, you know it can have up to one gig of that highspeed sample memory.

Um, which is just crazy stuff. So that's where your money is going folks. You know everyone goes. Oh, why can't it just be a little tiny black box hooked up to a regular? Windows PC No, it can't be there's you know, many, many, tens of millions of dollars of R&D which goes into producing that board and those hybrid modules.

And I Know what you're all thinking. Does it smell like $140,000 worth of scope? Oh yeah, Catch you next time. Yeah.