Impromptu tear down time guys. We got the P scope 5,000 series and we got Daniel on camera and yeah, why not? We're here at the Amona stand and uh, we thought we'd rip this sucker apart and have a look. Should have put my good mic on that camera so it's probably going to be crap audio. sorry about that but uh I couldn't I Normally I'd have my Swiss army knife in my pocket but uh, coming on the plane not allowed to bring it since 911 and uh I'm sure Pico won't mind me taking apart this scope.

Actually, this screwdriver is having a hard time fitting and this is a uh 16bit converter. Um, it's got uh, adjustable resolution from 8 Bits to 16 bits. Here we go and hopefully it should be pretty easy to take apart. No hang on.

Oh, it's not a Phillips it's one of those bloody annoying POS posy screw posy, drive whatever you call it and just get in there. Got it? Got it? Got it? We're in. all right, we're in like Flynn I About to say that. oh, hang on.

this is tricky. Okay, we got rubber night. it's coming. it's coming.

Tada there we go. John's going to be a bit upset if I break it. Oh jeez, we got an audience breing. oh my.

God right. we got the ass end of the board. Got credit card to come with there. we got the bottom of the board.

There we go. they've got uh so Dual side populator they got some shield in surface mount shielding Pico branded look at that. Wow, that's fancy, pancy and uh, is that the main oscillator down there? 10 MHz that looks like it would be and uh yeah, all right. So obviously we got a for front.

this is a four Channel yep, four Channel scope with external trigger and uh, can't see any converter. We got a BGA package there. You can see the see the Via footprint on the bottom and uh, bit of flux resid you on the hand soldering. they haven't cleaned that.

So on the Bncs, the hand soldered stuff down there and uh, the DC power jack on the back. that's uh, but there's no shielding on that. They clearly don't need it. They're uh, just happy with the shielding on their front end.

I Thought this would be quite trivial I thought the top plastic cover would just pop off. Maybe it's not possible. Maybe I got to unscrew the board. But now we're getting serious.

Which means I have to take the front and back panels off I'm trying not to break the tabs. That's the that's the thing I might have it. These things went deep into the plastic and maybe yeah, there we go. Here we go.

Actually let me put this back like that and then we'll flip that out and we're in. t A They get cans. They've got cans on the front end. Love heartshaped cans and love heart they are.

Look at that. is that deliberate? What have they done that for? Why have they got and there? Look at those Bnc's Maybe they knew you'd be opening it. Check out the Bnc's oh, they haven't seen. look.

they're rounded. Look at those. They got sexy little rounded ends on the back of them that's unusual. Where do they get those from? Ah Spartan 6 Fpga There you go.

So yeah, it's got some Dam hooked on there and I don't know. I'd have to get my macro lens out to look at the individual converters, but uh, obviously got the trigger stuff around here. There's a read really? yeah, you know I'm pretty sure there are some 3D microscopes with. there are plenty of 3D microscopes around here.

We could take it over to the Uh, that would be interesting wouldn't it? We could take it over and uh, have a look. How about we do that? We're headed off to find a microscope I Think we should be able to find one in the TR Let's have a So I could get my macro lens out, but that's not nearly as much fun. So here we go. Oh found one? What? No.

I I Really like this one here. All right, All right, sexy, buy it. Excellent it. This one is great.

This one is. Check out this. This is from a company called Tagano Tagano and it's a Uh 404 40 times zoom and I've got foot pedal down here which allows me to zoom in and out on that and that's 40 times 40 times Zoom look at that. Fantastic and I can tilt this too.

Hang on it will autof focus and come back. supposedly. hang on I might have to turn the oh there we go, it's too much. Oh there we go.

it's too bright so that will There we go and uh we can have a look at the main chip. So what we've got. Oh hang on here we go. I'll tell you what I thinks on here at first pass all I Got my pointer here H look at this.

This is great. It's a HDMI output uh by the way and the working distance. Check out the working distance on this. it's that's like 250 mm or something like that.

Crazy. Do you know what's the 250 or spot on? There you go good. guess. All right.

So 250 mm and we got a Spartan 6 fpga Uh, we don't have enough light maybe can we? Oh there we go. A beautiful well done all right. First time I've used this all right. So we got ourselves Spartan 6 fpga with memory next to it and obviously this is the ADC because you can see four.

It's a four Channel unit so you can see four differential amps I'm guessing so they're our 4 amps and that's what number is that turned around the right way. It's ASD 5020 so there's no manufacturer on that but uh well we can. Oh there we go. Zoom in.

You don't have to zoom in, it's there you go. So that's the I presume that's the main ADC So and I love these foot pedals. You can just operate. This is great.

So yeah, I'm assuming four amps coming out or four drivers for the uh ADC drivers. Unfortunately, we can't get under the cans because they're all uh, they're solded on but uh, that's a bit of a bummer. Don't know what's doing with the uh love heart shaped uh cutouts there because there's no adjustment pots underneath those so go figure. But uh, for those playing along at home, we have a Spartan 6, XC 6s, LX 25 and there e squ prom and what do we got here? Cyprus seey uh not sure.

oh that would be the USB driver I'm assuming dead giveaway when the traces come out and uh go into your USB there and there. Our power supply from our DC input a loving this microscope I mean look at the zoom we can get on this. This is ridiculous. 250 mm working distance and 40 time zoom and the depth of field is pretty good too.

So very impressed by this more power supply around here. that's all your trigger stuff. They got a TX Dack There we go. So that's setting your trigger level or is this one of those? No, this is a signal Gen.

This is a this model unit actually has a signal Gen. So we've got an Ad 9744 TX Dack generator and uh, there's our output buffer amp there LT what else? eh, nothing doing there. That's your external trigger so that'll be like a comparator. something like that.

More comparators in there. There's probably another deck and uh Co that's it. Nothing else left. Unfortunately, we can't get inside the cans.

but uh, there you go. That's just an impromptu tear down. Back over here Dan impromptu tear down of the Uh PCO Scope 5 443b Beauty catch you next time And yes, I'm back home from the trade show and I thought I'd check out this ASD 5020 uh ADC that we found in this picoscope 5000 and this is what I love about Tear. Downs You get to often find uh companies and chips you didn't know exist before and in this case, um, check it out.

ASD Arctic Silicon Devices I Can't say I've ever, uh heard of them before and this is a preliminary product specification I Found this data sheet from uh Mousa it was the first link actually that uh popped up so um, but I can't actually find the part on Mouser but the data sheet is on there and I can't find any other suppliers so I dug a bit uh I Also, uh Googled where is it here we go? um Hitte Microwave Corporation Actually back in 2011 so like a couple of years back actually acquired Arctic Silicon Devices a high performance mix signal IC company for 12 million bucks in cash and Equity Um and it provides Hittite new IC design and verification capability State-of-the-art product line of analog to digital converters. There you go! Who knew they uh, successfully designed and launched Innovative multi-function low power ADC products which high performance specifications including Tada testing measurement systems and Communications Infrastructure Fantastic! So there you go. That's what we've got here. we've got ourselves.

um this ASD 55020 I'm not sure if you can still buy it I need to dig a bit deeper, but yeah, sure enough, it's got this uh, multi uh mode converter 12bit mode uh 600 single Channel mode jeel or quad Of course the sample rate seems to uh drop of course Bas because it's a multiplexed um analog to digital converter but 12-bit mode there and 8 bit mode there single Channel mode up to uh 1,000 Meg samples per second in single Channel 8bit mode So pretty darn impressive. Little chip only draws uh half a watt at 640 Meg samples per second only? Well, I you know that sounds pretty darn good to me. Um integrated Cross Point switches instantaneous switching internal low Jeter programmable clock divider ah, internal reference circuitry, course and fine gain control. So there you go: digital fine gain adjustment for each ADC Very nice little chip runs off a 1.8 Vol Supply utilizing time inter leave to increase uh sampling rate integrated Cross Point switches dual Channel Mode Excellent! I Like it based on proprietary structure and employees internal reference circuit, serial control Lvds output data blah blah blah blah blah is designed to interface easily with F programmable Fpgas from several vendors.

There you go: I Really like it the Precision oscilloscopes Tada no kidding Ultrasound. All sorts of applications like that. so I'll include the link um down below if you want to uh, check out the data sheet in depth. but uh, you can get a Precision mode one which is 14bit up to 105 Meg samples per second, the HS type or the PM type and you'll notice of course that uh, there is no 16bit option here.

That is because um, it's actually a 12bit uh converter And to get the higher resolutions for example, like to get or 14bit. So to get the uh uh, greater resolution, they have to actually uh Multiplex the channels together. So if you want the full 16bit resolution uh, your four Channel scope becomes a one channel scope. and if you want 15-bit resolution um, you can only use Uh two channels for example.

So, but uh, that is uh, you know the flexibility of this thing that allows you to do that. You just uh, tie the things together with this uh Cross Point uh Max array on the input and you're able to uh, do all this and the Fpga can handle it and give you um the desired resolution result. But even with utilizing that uh interleaf sampling on the input channels, this thing is still capable of Uh 500 uh Meg samples per second at a full 12 bits. So still a very impressive scope.

If we look at the data sheet for the 5000 series, which is not a new Uh product, uh, by the way, then um, you know it talks about things like uh Combined with that, segmented memory allows you to capture events in Rapid sequence. So full segmented memory capability at the fastest time base. you can use Rapid triggering there to collect 10,000 waveforms in under 20 milliseconds and it's got MK limit uh testing as well I'm not sure if that's done in har all that's done in the Picco scope uh software, by the way, but uh, still. it's quite versatile.

and Powerful little um USB scope I really like it. That's one of the advantages of a USB Uh. Generally speaking, a USB scope over a PC scope is that they're generally going to give you, in this case, much greater resolution than you would get on a traditional bench scope. In this case, up to 16 bits.

It's got a pretty, uh, impressive amount of buffer memory down here. I Mean, you know, we're talking up to 120, up to five, some models up to 512 uh, Meg samples for 8bit and Uh 256 Meg samples for greater than uh 12bits. So that's uh, pretty darn impressive. Um I'm not sure if you can, uh, continuously, uh, stream this data at a slower rate over USB uh, maybe maybe not.

I Haven't looked into the Uh details, but often that's one of the advantages of the USB um scope is that you can stream directly to the PC and essentially have un limited, uh memory noise. Uh, down here, even though we weren't able to take a look at the front end 8bit mode, 120 microv volts RMS down at the 16bit mode, they're claiming 70 microvolts RMS noise level. and interestingly, if we have a look at the Uh hitti, uh, website microwave Corporation Yeah, they've got uh, you know, they've got a ton of stuff. um, absolute ton of it.

But uh, down here. Well, they have data converters there. we go ad uh, C's and once again, their feature pipeline architecture results from 8 to 14 bits. so they still sort of carry these converters.

but if you have a look at, uh, their offerings down here, the 5020 doesn't seem to be available. I mean look 14bit quad, it's the 1520 now. Uh yeah, they've changed the numbering system. It's now the HM CAD 1520 so the chip is still available.

and uh yes, I Checked the date code on the video there and you would have already noticed that if you're paying attention. Uh yeah, this the scope. I Actually, uh, tore down at the trade show. There was actually a 3-year-old uh demo unit.

So There you go 2010 That's why it has the old chip. so presumably the new one uh, that Picos Scope would sell would use the new Hittite uh branded and this particular part number. but uh, pretty much it's it looks to be the identical chip. They've just integrated that uh line of chips into the hit height, uh, number in system and stuff like that.

So there you go it was Arctic Silicon Devices no longer and that's the thing you got to be careful of as a designer when you're designing something like this. If you use, you know this is quite a novel uh chip I Really liked it, but you know, Artic Silicon Devices. They got bought out for $12 million. They're not exactly a huge player in the ADC uh Market they never were.

So the risk was when uh, Hittite bought them out. they might have, you know Consolidated some of the product range and discontinued um, the ASD 5020 and Picco Scope would have been left up the proverbial creek without a paddle. They would have had to, uh, either discontinue the product or find uh, some way or some other equivalent chip. which I greatly doubt the amount of re-engineering I mean this product was obviously with the flexible sampling architecture was pretty much uh, you know, designed and modeled around the availability of this chip from Arctic Silicon prices I Don't think anyone else probably has anything to uh match it on the market.

So yeah, if hit height, uh, decid to discontinue the chip. Pigos scope would have been faced with usually a last buy, uh order. Usually they don't just suddenly discontinue the chip. sorry, they'll put out a no to saying look where you know, here's the last buy coming up.

Uh, we'll only make the chip for one more uh lot. Give us your maximum number you want to buy and then that'll be it. So uh, if they did do that Pico Scope would have had to went well. We're over going to buy a million of these things I mean how many of these Scopes are we going to sell over the next years? Or um, they would have done that, um, to a certain number to keep it going for a while.

but ultimately they would have had to either discontinue it or really, um, seriously, re-engineer this thing from scratch which really would have been a dog. So there you go. Um, that was rather interesting I Hope you enjoyed that little impromptu uh, tear down. sorry about the uh, lack of audio and video quality and uh, completeness as would have been in a normal tear down, but that was an impromptu one right at the last minute.

decided oh, we're here. why not shoot a tear down? Yeah, catch you next time.