Hi welcome to Tear down Tuesday Got something very interesting for you today: a Sony DME 7,000 digital Video Effects unit. This is a professional uh, quality broadcast, uh, editing bit of gear that they use in TV studios all around the world and this one actually comes from a TV uh Studio here in Sydney or former one uh TV 1 that was on the Fox tail uh cable TV nwor they've just shut down in December last year I believe So they tossed out all their gear and I scored this effect unit. Oh yeah I love the smell of Niche Professional Electronics like this in this case uh, digital video production equipment I Don't know whether or not they uh, generally do this with PCS and stuff these days, but I think these things are still incredibly popular. this is about 1996 vintage or something like that.

that was when it was first released. um I don't even know if Sony uh still sell them I have no idea, maybe they still do. but uh. anyway, this is designed for professional TV studios to edit and add effects and Fades and wipes and all sorts of effects to uh their video all in real time using one of these custom controller things and take a look at it I Sadly, I don't have that uh with it I've only got this is just the control panel which takes the uh digital video in digital or analog I think in video in and out of the system and does all this processing for it and there's no need for a PC This is all done directly in the hardware in here.

all these video effects so it's going to be really interesting. We've got eight different boards inside this sucker and well I think we're in for an interesting look. Let's go and here it is and it really is enormous. It's a big uh 19in rack mount thing, geez, kind got to swing my camera out of the way and we've got all these different plug-in boards in here for all the different effects.

We're going to have main processor and then different boards for different types of, you know, linear, nonlinear effects and you know all sorts of digital stuff. They've got discrete Hardware dedicated to doing these video effects as I said, no PC attached to it whatsoever. There is a control panel for the user interface and stuff like that, but then the VGA screen connects directly to that uh control panel. I Believe, no PC involved.

All done in discreete hardware and I Love Really professional level Electronics Like this, it's going to be designed superbly. It's Sony okay and we've seen Sony uh, tear Downs before and but this is, you know, another level. This is professional level gear spared no expense whatsoever. It's not designed for a consumer price point.

If you have to ask, uh, the price for something like a system like this, you can't can't afford it, don't even bother. um, but if anyone does know the price I'd like to know even if they uh, still sell it. this is not a HD uh unit. It only does uh SD uh comp component video watch which is what the TV1 uh network was.

They haven't actually hadn't actually upgraded to uh HD yet, but it really is professional level uh, video processing and effects and they go to a lot of effort in the hardware to ensure that the image quality remains absolutely perfect. And here's the manual for it, which I will link in so I won't go into uh, huge detail and also Link in the user and uh configuration manual as well. but look, you know it's there's the user interface for it with the track ball and all the custom buttons directly hooked up to the monitor which then this uh control panel hooks up to the processing unit and it's the processing unit that we've actually got here. This doesn't do any processing itself, it's just sort of like the uh, user interface software and things like that.

and uh oh, it does. Basically, it's a multi effects unit and that's what it does. That's what we're going to tear down today. And of course, it does all sorts of weird and wonderful effects, but it promotes heavily the fact that it's um, you know, it's video quality.

Unprecedented picture quality. Employees: 4222 uh processing. that's the chroma Subspace uh sampling and things like that which I won't go into uh details on that really. It's quite a complex field, but and it samples at a 10bit resolution and then it does all the processing in digital of course, hence why it's called a digital Uh multi effects unit.

So once it's actually converted, that analog signal in digital can do pretty much anything it likes and it does it directly in Hardware in this thing which is fantastic. not a PC as I said before and this also can hook up as part of a big system to a digital switching unit so it can keep the all the video signals in digital format and then route them through switches as part of a more complex uh network of editing and uh recording gear and Al and broadcast gear and all sorts of stuff with inside. a typical TV studio. and it can do all sorts of weird and wonderful effects glow effects, brick effects, shadow effects, sparkling, all that sort of stuff.

but it does it Really Super high quality and it does go into uh, how it actually uh, does pixel, uh, interpolation, and all sorts of stuff like that. and uh does color correction. and man, there's tons of stuff. so you'll get different boards which hopefully we'll see inside here that do you know, might have a specific board for color correction processing for example.

and uh, you know that's the whole specs for the thing if you want to read it and we've got a whole bunch of these boards. There's eight boards installed in this unit, so we'll find out which ones we got and a whole bunch of specs for those interested. um SD as I said, it is not HD it is uh, pal. Well, presumably it's pal SD standard here used by the TV1 Network it's why they shut it down.

couldn't be bothered going HD And for those curious, this box fully populated, weighs about 27 kilos and draws just over 400 wats. So there you go. Oh what a beast. And when you open the thing up, you can see a big power supply uh, slot over here that'll likely my guess might be contained a pidal Transformer a nice, uh, low leakage pidal or something like that.

Don't want anything interfering with any analog, uh, sampling stuff in here. You want to avoid that as much as possible. Some status leads up here I haven't actually powered the thing up? uh I believe it was pulled directly from the rack. so I of the understanding that it still fully works, you can see the nice um RFI tabs down the bottom here and uh, this cage on the front just un screws and then we can pull the individual Boards out.

So let's do that. I've undone the screws and hey, look at that some more. RFI uh finger tabs on there I love those. they're just they're spongy like that so they make uh they make good contact as it slides in.

Just absolutely brilliant attention to detail on that. You can tell that this is a professional level bit of Kit And let's just slide a typical board out here. Nice little levers as you'd expect and taada. look at that.

I'm We take a look at each board in detail of course, but Woohoo! just goes on and on. It's like the Star Wars You know, the uh, rolling, uh, intro thing. It just goes on and on and on. Look at that Din 41612 connectors.

the connector of choice for uh, all these sorts of rack instruments. man. I can't even fit that on the wide angle lens here. Just ridiculous.

Woohoo! And that's the back of the unit. Two huge fans over here, plus all you're connecting all all ton of BNC uh, stuff. All of your interface stuff for the control panel of course. Then you got a network interface terminal.

You know, none of this. uh, ethernet and uh, networking. you know, PC stuff and things like that. although I think I read somewhere that does have some sort of uh Ethernet type interface in it somehow.

but these are actually all. um, well, a majority of these are all RS 422. Uh, serial interfaces. So differential pair serial interfaces? RS 422 Of course, very common.

It's got some RS 232 on here as well, but 422 is more common as a proper differential uh pair. for long runs. in professional applications like this, let's look at the analogs and here's all our fantastic looking Bnc's I Love these and these would be the highest quality Bnc's Of course they wouldn't Sony wouldn't be skipping on these things. By the way, Serial number 50764 that's a lot more than I expected that that they would have made of these things.

but hey, I guess there's a lot of TV stations out there I wonder how many total they actually made I don't know the manufacturer date of this. will uh be able to date it when we actually, um, open the thing. but as I said, uh, it dates from around 1996. That's when the model.

This model, uh was first introduced. Don't know if it's still for sale or uh, how long it was in the market, but these sort of things have a long lifespan. They really do. And here's your standard anal log component inputs over here.

and of course, all professional broadcast uh, video is all done as component video. It is not done as a mix together you know, s video or composite signal or something like that cuz you want the absolute utmost highest quality. So they have the component inputs and it is your typical Uh Ypbpr system. So we've got our y input here which is our Luma signal and then we've got the two different signals.

So it's the blue signal minus the Luma signal and then the red signal minus the Luma signal and you'll notice there is no green. We don't need green because green can be uh inferred from the other Uh two signals. And there's a key input. uh here.

I'm not exactly sure of the function of that in terms of uh, the professional, uh editing environment. For those in the know, it's some sort of, you know, maybe some sort of synchronization signal for the system or something like that. I'm not entirely sure, but they're our analog inputs. and of course, these are our component analog outputs after all the video processing.

So it's a Uh two channel system by the looks of it. and I'm not sure about all the combiner inputs and how they actually work as part of the system. You can go and read the whole system installation and all that sort of uh stuff. Or for those familiar with it, please leave it in the comments.

And of course, as I said, digital video out as well. So after it's converted here, they can actually output and switch and process the digital signals directly with other units and send them to video switching units and stuff like that. Actually, it's interesting that the analog outputs have a Sync here and also a key, so maybe that's like a key frame or something like that. Perhaps that I'm actually thinking of.

and thankfully, I do have a list of all the different boards. Looks like there's some little piggyback boards in there and what they do, and as I said, Looks like we've got almost the full compliment. There is one missing board I Think the nonlinear effects board could be missing here, but look digital Sparkle Effects white Graphics boards combiner, lighting effects key Channel That key channel is uh, probably that key frame uh connector we saw on the back I was talking about Advanced shadow effects and then uh down the bottom. Looks like we have our digital um input boards and uh output boards so they will have the big uh, high quality 10bit Dck and Adc's on there for converting the videos and input and output.

and uh, there you go. So let's start off with the pro processor board up the top here and as we saw before, it looks like it's all going to be predominantly surface mount and that's what you'd expect from 1990. You know, the mid90s uh thing looks like oh I got some connectors for some piggyback stuff here, but look at that. that is our main processor board and it looks like that they're going to be nicely labeled.

The PCB design has done excellent work here or the system designer done great work and labeled everything separate. KF There we go is that key frame Hardware down here we've got IO stuff and the main processor ether net up the top. There you can say see it says ether and wow look at that and as I said all Din 41612 connectors down the side here looks like we've got three of them. Two are here we go.

sorry about that. Uh, the top and bottom ones are three-way ones and the center one four-way Look at that. So the center to one might be. you know power.

One might be dedicated to power for example, and the other's dedicated to IO or something like that. That would be my guess anyway. but uh yeah. and of course on the back look full shielding on every board.

There's probably no components on the back, so I don't think I'll bother taking the shielding off. I might do it on one, but sort of had a little Peak down in there and I can't down the corner down in there can't really see anything so you know nothing really exciting on the bottom there. all the components on the top beautifully laid out. Look at the layout of these boards.

I think we'll see that across all of the boards. Really professional level placement. Nobody's Auto placed these things by the way, and I'll probably talk about the PCB layout later once we get a probably a more dense or complex example. This one's relatively, uh, simple in the scheme of things.

Um, so it's all about component placement anyway. I'll go into that later. Four batteries up here. They're pretty serious.

I presume that they're all uh, wired in in parallel? are they or I don't know. That's weird. dedicated uh controller up the top IDT chip. There's a couple of chips I recognize National Semiconductor Mark Let's take a look at the individual bits and of course it is made in Japan Beautiful.

and I do like the front panel multimeter test points. Look at that, They're right. You can just plug your probe straight in. They've got the 2 mm socket there that will fit your probe precisely.

You can plug them in in this case. 5volt test connector. Brilliant. And this one looks like it has a whole bunch of diagnostic leads and mode dip switches.

I'm not sure what they are. you'd have to read the manual and anytime you've got a connector on the front panel, an access user accessible uh connector like this. not designed to go out the back of the unit, but designed to be only accessed once you take the front cover off. It's some sort of, you know, diagnostic slash programming.

You know, interface like that. Somebody comes along. They want to do something to the rack, troubleshoot, or maybe configure it in, uh, some way or something like that. Then they'd come along.

they'd programming box or their diagnostic box or whatever into that thing and uh, you know, do their business. But it's not designed for normal sister operation. That's why it's on the front of the board unaccessible when you open the door and not on the back panel, because once these things are installed in the rack, of course, you can't access the bloody back panel. It's a pain in the ass for the technicians to come along and troubleshoot.

These things don't want that or or to change the configuration that they might have to do every once in a while or something like that. So yeah, you mount on the front. Nice and convenient. Check this out.

This is interesting. This is obviously part of the power input on this D 41612 connector here. Got a uh, just an electrolytic cap here. surface mount.

Look at these two beasts. They got like a plastic cover on them. These are actually fuses. They're 10 Amp 125 volt fuses.

Almost as if they got a ceramic interior covered by a plastic outer things. It's almost like they're a little mini. Uh HRC High Rup rupture capacity fuse I Haven't seen that form factor before. Very interesting.

and in case you're wondering, 10 amp? Oh, that's a huge amount, isn't it? Well, not really. CU These are these D 41612 connectors. Very high current capacity per pin. They've paralleled up at least four pins here for that main input there probably the Uh main 5vt input and you can easily get 10 amps out of those four pins.

So it does actually have an Ethernet interface as I read in the document there National Semiconductor Sonic Chipset there for Ethernet. but it doesn't have a standard Ethernet connector, so eh, it must be you know doing it some other physical Uh connector, maybe via the control panel or something like that perhaps? And please forgive it being upside down, all the electrons are going to fall out. But anyway, we have ourselves a date code 9907 some of the other 74 AC series chips around here sort of, you know, late 98 vintage so it looks like this was uh manufactured sometime in 1999. So yeah, not that long ago, 14 15 years old and what we have here is an IDT Risk Processor 32-bit wrist processor nothing fancy typical of the age of you know, 99 four kind of vintage processor 40 mips at 50 mahz so not exactly a screamer and uh, really interesting choice for Sony to actually uh do that.

but I don't think that's the main processor for all the uh doing and controlling all of the effects. and why don't I think that? Well, it's simply location of the thing. it's right over here near the connector. It's got no huge memory coupled uh to it.

lots of other logic around here, so my guess would be that that IDT Risk processor is probably controlling or talking to in some way. the the control panel, that user control panel that we looked at something like that I don't think it's doing much more than that because if you have a look over here, we've got ourselves. We'll have to lift the skirt up on that one and find out what that is. But look at all the memory coupled into that.

plus the daugh board up here. probably for expanded memory and stuff like that. So this has got to be doing most of the grunt work over here. This is just miscellaneous interface or some other type stuff and then near to the risk processor.

We got a couple of other uh programmable devices here. Why are they programmable? Well, dead giveaway. they've got labels on them and they also say uh CPU as well EPM 7032 CPU 196. Take that off, see what we have under and we don't actually have a processor and the number was a dead giveaway I Knew it was familiar.

It's an Altera PL EPM 7032 Exactly as it said on the label. you know, sort of an old school low density. PL So they've just got some sort of glue logic stuff like that embedded in these things, but obviously not enough glue logic to fit in these. A They've got multiple devices, but they've also got all these 74 AC series stuff around here.

and yes, it is. AC Um, much higher performance than the HC of course, so that'll be, uh, chewing some juice as well contributing to that. 400 W uh, power consumption. But these days of course you'd fit all of that inside one Fpga or something like that.

But hey, back in those days, they decided to use no less. Well, three here. There's another couple of Uh devices over here. These look like, uh, they could even be um, Eoms I think so anyway, but a whole bunch of sort of glue control logic could easily have been replaced by one large scale Fpga But hey, they made the choice to do it a bit old school.

maybe even. uh, based on an older design system or something like that, so they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. Eh, Maybe they already had a lot of schematics for it and they're doing an upgrade from a previous processor design. Uh, something like that.

So yeah, that's what you end up with. And yep, they are exactly as the label said: 27 C14, Eom. so they would be for the main processor down here. We'll now take a look at Ah well, you read the label and there you go.

It's another alter CLD but a bigger beast in this case, the EPN uh, 7064. So I don't have need to lift the label. In fact, you can start seeing the Altera Mark there and don't be confused by the CPU 196. It just occurred to me that's actually the model number of this board.

here. It's called the CPU 196, so it's not like there's a CPU in there. a CPU soft core or something like that inside this thing. There's not.

It's a CP that probably couldn't even do a process of soft core inside this thing. You need an Fpga for something like that. So yeah, they've got some really dedicated logic happening in here with a whole bunch of memory dedicated to it and each one of those memory chips SD ram of course, but pretty huge of course 1 megabit or 128k by8 SRAM for each one of them and they got 32 of them on that board. plus uh, looks like connector for another piggyback memory board as well.

So there you go. 32 megabit of SD of s Ram I Have you know, well, only 70 nond SRAM on this thing but obviously doing all that uh, maybe frame storage or something like that. And here's this: KF section which I've assumed is key frame? but I could be wrong. We've got some IDT uh, fifo.

possibly fifo memories or highspeed memories here, but looks of an old school gal over here and this is what I was afraid of in this whole tear down is custom Sony stuff and I've been surprised by the sort of lack of it on this processor board. actually I Suspect we're going to get hit with a lot more Sony custom branded stuff and well, I don't even think we'll be able to Google that part number. it's got some memory attached to it. could be an off-the-shelf uh processor or you know that's just rebranded with a Sony part number.

but Sony being so huge, they can spin their own silicon. so I think we're not going to see the end of this. Unfortunately, in this tear down, we may not be able to get a a good understanding of what the individual devices are and my guess that these IDT ones were Fos was actually wrong. They're actually are IDT 7164 they 64k bit high-speed SRAM organized as 8K by 8.

Then we've got this IO section down here and this probably does a lot of the RS4 uh 422 serial Communications as I said to various uh other things. And yes, we do have some custom Sony branded chips around here. We got four Rrin reays here. they're sort of, you know, Oddball out of place over there on their own.

Obviously we've got an NEC looks like it could be some sort of NEC little micro there or something. We got a crystal associated with that and these look for all the world like memory going down here. There's a few of them and then we have a what looks like a programmable device uh next to it. and yeah, these are individual Hatachi processors HD 647, 180 little 8bit micros and they got four of them all down.

The board looks like coupled with their own memory over here and well, what do we got for the interface over here? And yep, I was bang on Rs232 differential line drivers in this case. Uh, dual Am26 Ls30 Bingo! So these microcontrollers here are handling all of the Rs232 interface easy. And it's interesting how they've segmented the design here, but that's what you expect in these big systems engineering things. You know? somebody worked on designing this little interface over here.

Somebody worked on this main processor architecture. Somebody might have worked on this key frame stuff. and they keep it all modular. Maybe even.

uh, you know they drew this, did the schematics themselves for each section. Somebody merged it all together and things like that. because this is a huge job designing this sort of system. This is only just one of the boards in here.

We got seven more to go. Oh goodness, how long is this video going to be? Obviously, one engineer hasn't done this if they did. They had a lot of coffee and pizza boxes. Let me tell you.

And of course, there's one thing you may have noticed. Absent from any of this is any bypass caps pass. You know? Look, there's nothing on here. What Are they relying on the big ground plane in there? No.

Obviously, we're going to find some bypass caps on the bottom. I've taken the screws off I Haven't had a look yet, but we expect that. That's the only thing you'll find on the bottom. and Tada it is.

Look at that. all of the passives. but it's not just caps. We've got some uh, looks like termination resistors up here around this main.

That's uh, the main CP D up there. So they're probably doing, you know, a whole bunch of resistors. So they're terminating uh, something. And of course, there.

you go. Bypass caps for each individual chip down in there. too easy, not much else. they got some so 23s for that power stuff with the battery back up and things like that.

but yeah, nothing too fancy. Once again, some uh, termination resistors down here for is over this unpopulated uh, internal connector by the way, so that one's got nothing on the other side, but they have populated all of the resistors there anyway. I Do find it interesting how on this whole board they've got one dip part and that's this old school gal over here. So that's almost a dead giveaway that this is based on an earlier design because they already did it.

Nobody wanted to. Ah, you know it's Friday afternoon. I Don't want to have to respin this thing and put it inside something else. Let's just copy it.

Bugger it, We'll just bung it in there for the next design. She'll be right. Bob's your uncle, no worries. And of course, as with any professional design attention to detail, you don't want any the bottom of the board if it flexes to short out to the metal shielding underneath.

So proper insulating sheet. thumbs up! and we are missing that second board in there with what I thought was a nonlinear effects board. But thankfully they have the part number on here. and no, we do have the nonlinear effects board so let's take a look at that one now.

and I I'm fairly sure that they have to be in specific order inside the Shazzy. I Don't think it's just like a generic parallel bus at the back and you can just whack them in there willy-nilly I Think they have to be in specific locations, but I could be wrong. I Haven't read the you know 100 page manual in any sort of detail, so look at that. We have our nice piggy backboard here which has an Mpu on it and uh oh look at this.

this is this is interesting. Look at this. this. Wow.

this is quite getting quite dense. but look at that. This one's actually not one big board, but it's actually multiple boards there connected with board to board interface like that. Interesting why they've gone for that made that system design Choice over the one big board with saw before.

M Now I Believe the rest of the boards we're going to look at here are completely optional, but hey, you know that's the entire point of this effects unit is that you do effects with it and this is the first one. This is the nonlinear effects board and I'll read the manual. It does non overlay effects such as wave Ripple flag and broken glass effect and also uh, overlapping effects such as page turning, roll in cylinders and spheres, and all those wanky things that you saw in you know that were very common in sort of 1990s Weding videos and things like that. So that's what that this board can do.

But interesting to note that you also need another board which we do have in here which is a combiner SL lighting board and they say that's required in order to improve the edge quality of the image. So that's rather interesting in that this Bard can do all the effects processing, but to get better quality in terms of the edges of the image, you need another board. Very interesting. This is getting rather annoying.

These boards are so big that I can barely fit them in frame Here you can't see much detail. You might have to watch this in HD But anyway, as I said, two separate boards. Why they've done that? I don't Actually no, um, there's maybe subdivided the tasks again. But the good thing here is that they've actually uh, separated as before all the silk screen stuff.

So this is the Zed process. Part of it actually looks like only two Sony branded chips in there. For the Zed process. this is the multiply and add so just just doing multip multiplication and adding this is the CP up up here.

They've got another one of these IDT 32-bit processors up here with the ROMs here. um well, ROMs here and another couple of Altera uh cplds. what else have we got? We got floating point plus integer math around here. This section over here is labeled Serial 2 Sl3 not exactly.

uh, sure what that is. We got ourselves a DSP processor up here, so I'm not sort of not sure what that's actually dedicated to, but uh, you. Obviously they needed no surprises. Uh Texas Instruments TMS 320.

It's was and probably still is the industry standard DSP uh processor. So anytime you need DSP stuff, you're going to find something like this in anything from sort of you know, 1980s vintage through to 2000's vintage. you're still going to find Texas Instruments 320 series DSP in there. um, float and uh, divide as well.

So we got some more. This is Mpu. Um well. this is an Mpu board so we got floating, uh, point and dividing operations.

We've got H&v output, so I'm not sure what H&v is. We've got another Power device down there and there's Zed and the key output as well. the key frame output once again, some Sony custom chips in there. Uh, so that must be dedicated to the output.

That key output BNC we saw on the back panel connector cuz here is also some key circuitry over here. so maybe that I don't know detects the key frame or synchronizes outut or something like that. Figures it out and this one output drives it. or I don't but it's more.

you know, it's not just a driver. We got some processing happening down here, some serious devices happening. so yeah, it's rather curious. There's actually some sort of weird, uh, sort of Gunk on this.

Let me see if I can get a closeup check out all this weird stuff. It's not dust, it's actually like I Can you know there is a bit of dust on there? I can wipe off the dust, but it requires a lot more Force to wipe off whatever these white specks are and I didn't see them on the other boards. The other boards had dust, but they didn't have these white specks all over the place H Interesting and as I said, this board is full of Sony custom chips here. Whether or not they're just rebadged or there are custom Sony silicon I don't know I I Would presume that there're Sony custom silicon cuz there's a very specific task we're doing here for these video effects.

So wouldn't surprise me if they've rolled their own As6 for these sort of jobs or uh, you know, mask or something like that for these sort of, uh, specific tasks. and then for something like like the Zed process section here, well look, what are these part numbers? I Know we can Google them. but I doubt you're ever going to find any info on these things and that's all. There is just two custom Sony chips and of course you end up with that similar but different part number 6D 8838 for example you Google that and well, you find some obscure page somewhere that says it's a Seos Iio expander.

so I don't know. does that make sense in a Zed process section? Oh, not really. And then this custom multiplier and adder with, well, two uh, programmable devices here. what are they? and what is this? Sony custom chip? I don't know.

And that one has a couple of 8K By8 proms next to it. So yeah, they're programmed with the firmware to do the multiplying and adding inside this. but what is it? Some form of processor? Well, it's got to be. It's got some sort of prom.

so or it could be a state machine. uh, type things. something like that executing code in the prom. but what it is I Guess we'll never know.

And likewise, for all these other Sony uh chips as well. we got three identical ones here. who knows what they do, another one which looks the same, but it's not. It's got a different part number.

another couple down here in a section. so that's the Y processing. Who? What do we got? Yeah, we got the Y processing under the board. I've taken it out and it's got its own memory associated with that by the looks of it or that may not be may not be.

these are Sony branded as well. So goodness it's rather frustrating. And yes, they are running that risk processor at the full 50 MHz is capable of Woohoo! 40 Mips! Awesome! And it looks like we got a terminal interface here on the front and data interface as well. Once again, a technician or maybe even a user level can come around and plug something into these things and well have a fiddle now.

One idea for why they've split the board here I just came up with is uh, there's also a 3,000 series model of this uh processor unit which doesn't do nearly as much. So maybe uh, they've decided that well, for the 7,000 it can do some sort of extra effects which are de and they just want to decouple the design of that the effects part from more of the processing part over here. Or maybe they've got lesser options on the board that plugs into the 3,000 They didn't want to respin the whole thing, they wanted to reuse all of the more generic processing over here. perhaps? eh, that's my guess.

and there's that. TI DSP there. Copyright 1991 Awesome. Um, but of course it's much older than this and it's got the emulator connector over here so you can plug in the Uh Diagnostic and development uh tools over here so you can work on that sucker.

But as I said what that's actually doing, we've got some glue logic here with the alterior uh PL and various other stuff. but yeah, what the DSP is actually DSP in I Don't know. Now we're on to the WIP SLG Graphics board. I've taken the little uh daughter board off here.

It's got some beefy looking Sony chips on that. oh look at that. Jeez ton of stuff going on there anyway. Um, this provides white pattern related effects such as white crop, uh, wipe cropping.

uh patterns include vertical, horizontal slant, all those circular cropping, and all that sort of uh Jazz color mix generator, and additional Graphics functions are also included such as XY Z axis numeric position data, grid lines, offscreen location marks, and the graphics are inserted on the Uh video output for this thing so you can overlay uh grids and all sorts of stuff for editing and things like that. Look at this. This is the wiper generator circuitry. A huge amount of circuitry all in here, delineated by those white silk screen lines I Love that.

It just makes it really nice. The PCB designers, you know, really segregated all this sort of stuff. Fantastic and well look at at all that circuitry dedicated to doing wiping effects and stuff like that and it must be sort of Fairly generic cuz it's got all different types of wiping effect. But once again, Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony Sony So that wiper is all to do the wiping effects, but they've also got a processor on here.

Once again, the 32bit ID uh, IDT risk processor doing that. Hey, we've got some Uh Sip packages here. Some staggered pin sip packages for the memory down here who they ran out of space I guess on the board so they had to go for those highdensity SI packages probably need a ton of memory on this for doing uh, these sort of effects. so they've got those here and also down here as well and other obscure name things.

GDC Imp Whatever these things are I don't know, your guess is as good as mine. Masking and cropping has its own section right up here and then there's color mixing right up the top. Curiously, we don't see much of in this thing is we got a socket up here. dip socket for this.

What? C Why is that like a Cypress part or something like that? Yeah. I Checked. That's a Cyprus prom part. So there you go.

So they've obviously got some sort of processing and or state machine installed in these things that require all these proms associated with them. But all these dedicated Sony chips I Go. Goodness. And you Google these like Cxd 860 Three, you get a bit of a lead.

It's a matrix SL encoder chip. We got one. Yes, Look at this. Cxd 8063 data sheet.

Uh, found it. There it is. and well, it's not much, but the system clock, serial interface clock switch in, chip select Uh yeah. P Output limiter blah blah blah blah blah.

and well. here we go. We might have a bit of a block diagram. look look at that.

There we go make heads or tails of that. Actually, that one's interesting to find a data sheet on cuz not only is it used twice up here in the color mixer, but look all the wiper generator circuitry here here here. Uh, at least three times, four, five, six, seven, at least seven odd times in the uh, wiper generator circuitry. So there you go.

Pretty important chip. They' obvious ly rolled that for a specific purpose and well, they're using it to the hilt in this sucker. And now we're getting somewhere. Here's the 80 63s, but we've also got 860c XD 8 62s as well.

And I found a data sheet for these suckers as well, which as always I'll link in down below. Eh, at least we're getting somewhere there you go. The Cxd 862 uh, sort of like companion chip I guess, uh, absolute mode carrier it's doing some addin in there and H various other stuff limit, whatever that is. and uh, it looks like these are all serial controlled by the way.

Pretty much so interesting combination, so you can really go to town to figure out. Okay, 15-bit digital in to's complement mode. All right. Then there's a system clock driveing it all.

an interface clock. so it's all sort of Serial digital. uh, processing stuff like that. And we're certainly on a roll the chip next to it.

the Cxd 859. Fantastic. We can get this one as well. Once again, not a huge amount of info, but at least we're getting uh, the pin out and the block diagram.

and here we go is A. We got ourselves waveform generator, serial interface and control and yeah, looks like we got a mixer and modulation Adder moldy gain. All sorts of weird and wonderful stuff happening in that one. So you combine all these custom chips together.

these are obviously not designed for you. you know, generic Uh purposes? Well, maybe they might be using in multiple Uh products and things like that, but yeah, pretty much designed for a specific task engineered to go into the complete system and build up the whole thing. And this is the point at which you ditch Google because once you find one like this likely in this case, data sheet for you, they have the archive they've scanned in or you know, found uh, all these Sony data sheets for this particular product. So you find one in here and I Just go now and type in the number into here DOA sheet for you.

and ah, they're turning up all over the place. Here we go: I Just typed in the huge Uh chip on there the Big Quad Flat Pack Cxd 8060. It's a Seos polar coordinate and once again, we can get the data sheet for that sucker. Brilliant! Let's have a look inside this one.

There we go. It's a big chip. What is that? 120 pin quad flat pack? It's not that huge. but anyway, it's bigger than some of the others.

And once again, again, we get all pin outs. You know, all usable, uh, info. But look at this control. it's got ROM internal dividers, latches, rounding, square roots.

It's doing limiting. it's doing. um, it's squaring stuff. It's getting the absolute value of X and Y there.

and it's doing all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff and doing that at looks like parallel multiple times. Uh, all the data in parallel. and as I said, all serial controlled all clock controlled stuff like that. So fantastic.

If you really wanted to figure out how this stuff was doing it, you could, actually, you know, put together all these uh, system block diagrams and figure it all out. And unfortunately, we ran out of luck on the Cxd 831 that we've got around here in the mass crop region. Oh well, can't always win, but that one, for example. well, they might.

They're reusing them everywhere. so these are pretty generic parts and they're going to system engineer the things so that they can design. uh, generic. Parts They want to reduce the number of As6 which they have to do on this thing, so they've got it.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Eight times just on this one board. And next up is our combiner lighting board and we actually get our first look at some analog stuff. We'll take a closer look at all this analog section up here, but 2, 4, 6. Eight different sections clearly got hybrids with some analog input stuff.

so we take a look at those and then just all the usual regular, boring digital processing stuff. We've got ourselves. internal video process. Whatever that means, we've got ourselves.

Uh, H did external video C process boring video input. Uh, you know it's called video input, but look, it's two custom Sony uh digital parts. So you know nothing to do with analog at all. But check this out.

Something that we haven't seen yet on any of the boards is a bodge. But look, we got ourselves a bodge wire nicely tacked down here and here. going from this pin of this chip all the way out down the hole and presumably there some you know, ver on the bottom of the board for easy access. so they goof that up.

Very surprising at this sort of level, considering the amount of systems engineering that's gone in this to get it right. and have so few bodgers, Well, it's surprising to even see one at the end of the day. And here we go. We got analog inputs.

Dead giveaway looks. shield in ground. uh, shield in between each of the individual traces. So these aren't differential pairs.

these are single-ended got to be video signals. Uh, coming over analog signals into these. Uh, custom Sony hybrid chips. Because well, we'll take a look at the package in a minute.

but dead giveaway. the trace comes over here and then goes into a big AC coupling cap like that. So dead giveaway that it's video. There you go.

We got some analogy stuff happening around here, just all passive, uh, kind of stuff. We got an inductor. We've got some large uh caps which are probably the coupling caps. as I said, we got a few resistors, maybe some uh, termination in there, or something like that happening.

but anyway, these are custom, uh, hybrid chips. So yeah, let's see if we can, actually, uh, get a side on view of that. There you go. It's some sort of pin grid array like that.

and uh, yeah, it looks like some sort of ceramic hybrid with that's been uh capped on top. so that would be interesting. I don't want to actually, uh, destroy one. but yeah, they've rolled their own custom hybrid.

What is it? some sort of You Know video amplifier module? or uh, something like that? I Don't know and no surprises for finding a 75 Ohm resistor in there. Terminator and we just see more of the same. This is the shadow effects board and once again, the IDT Risk Processor up here. some of the huge Sony custom As6, but we've got something.

some things like the frame memory. there we go. we can recognize that up here up here. We got memory addressing around here.

common. What does that mean? I Got no idea. uh output processing and we got some filter. oh look a 3v regulator down here.

Wow. jeez I thought all this was H just 5V over the whole system but wonder what they need the 3vt and is it three or is it 3.3 I don't know. Interesting, but there you go and then you got some processing. More circuitry up here marked Common and then Big 10 amps.

They need a lot of grunt on this board and this one is the 7060 key. Channel Recursive effects board and well look at it. Chalk fool. This is one of the denses boards on here really and well, just all digital.

Fantastic. What can you say? Uh, it's all Sony This thing's got a ton of sections on here. We've got memory A B, C D down here. we've got uh what is it? Record Control I think it is uh no, well recursive yv fill something like that recursive KV fill yv fill uh C Former: whatever that is y oh no y Frame C Frame something like that recursive V ah go goodness dust KV Filter I presume it's a filter over there and all sorts of weird and wonderful names GDC whatever that is.

uh, input filter, mix, scan conversion all sorts of stuff Happening Here Control Generic Control filter V Oh man. more modules I can poke a crow Pro about now I was going to talk about PCB layout on something like this. Now with something like this. system and these boards, it's all you know.

like forget about the routing. It's all about the placement. So that's why you design and group the things into the individual modules and you put them and you of course group them together. It's all about the placement.

These individual sections may have been individually, uh, routed outside and then moved in as sections, but generally you would place all this because it's all digital. It's All Digital Then you could actually auto route uh, something like this, but not like complete auto rout and you might auto route some sections or something like that. Like all this memory stuff over here, you might let it sort of Route those after you've placed them and maybe done some, uh, pre-selective routing around here. trial routing to see that it actually does what you want, Then you'd copy it and let it rip on the whole lot or something like that.

But this is a huge placement job. Not necessarily a huge routing job, so you'd spend probably 90% of your time placing and figuring out where everything goes on this board rather than actually routing now. I'm on to the next board here, which actually doesn't have a number. so I'm not entirely uh, sure about what this one is.

It's one of the, uh, you know, effect boards. obviously something like that. but check out the routing on here. I mean you know it looks like it hasn't been Auto routed.

You know it looks fairly clean, fairly tight, all laid out in rows. very consistent. It looks like this has been done by a human. So I don't think there's a huge amount of Auto routing that's actually happened on here I Could be wrong.

They could be using a really Schmick uh Auto router. But as I said in professional layout, tasks like this: I've laid out boards almost uh, this big with this many number of chips. pretty close to it. and it's not about with an auto router.

You would not just place all the chips and then press the auto button. It does everything for you as I said you would selectively. you know I want to route just this memory section here please? I Don't want to waste time around with this. you know, just let it rip.

So you would place them like this and you'd say I you'd highlight those and just let those rip and sort of integrate all those in something like that. And of course, when you got when you want to layout and uh, route all these sort of stuff, well, complete modules like this. Look at this too easy, right? You just do one and then you can duplicate the route for each particular layer. and depending depending on the tool that your software uh, CAD tool that you're actually using, whether or not that's easy or hard to duplicate your roue in and get your net list right and everything else.

Well, that's another subject entirely and is very, uh, tool specific. but generally, once you've got that, it's pretty easy to duplicate your routes up like that. So something like this board might look hideously complex. and it is.

I Mean there's you know, somebody laying out this board would have probably spent. Oh, I don't know, that's that's a good couple of weeks job to lay out that board and get it all right. That's after everyone's done the schematic and integrated. you know? Ma Sure, all the parts of there everything else just to sort of play.

figure out where to place everything, do your trials Shuffle stuff around. All things like that because as you can see, it's pretty dense. There's not much room left on this board and you would have been tasked with some poor bastard tasked with laying out this board. Okay, it's got to fit on this board.

and well, probably they're going to say, well, we need it all singles sided because we want access and that's a professional way to do it for you know, servicing and all sorts of access issues and things like that. So we don't want double-sided load for example. Yeah, go ahead and put all the passives on the bottom. But as a general rule, it looks like in this whole system, somebody has determined well, we don't want chips on the bottom, we only want passives on the bottom, Thank you very much.

See, haven't got much physical room left over so you you might start, of course you might go okay. and by you know, start by placing a block like this and selectively routing it. Make and tightening up the layout so you'd work on on just one of these blocks and you go okay. and you get it down to that size because you might start by having the chips spread out a bit, but then you might find well once you've filled it up it takes this much of you know, half 2/3 of the board instead of half the board and you go well.

I can't afford that real estate cuz I can't fit everything else so you might have to spend a lot of time you know, a day just around with one of those sections to get it as tight as possible, shuffling around the placement which way you rotate the chips to try and get the tightest route possible in that section. So once you've optimized that layout around there and it's as tight as you could possibly get it and you're so super proud of it, Woohoo! Look what? I did you shout out from your cubicle? Yes! I got it, You know progress and well you've only just done that little bit but that's a huge key factor to then get in or to saving up all the space for all this other stuff which is is more spread out. So really, you know a lot of work goes into the early uh sections of this and then once you got okay, well I've got half my board dedicated to all these duplicated channels. Okay, I've just got enough room left for these and you place that and then, well, what happens if you place all these and then you go well I Needed an extra inch or half an inch on the board.

Ah, you're screwed. But these things generally come together in the end and you usually don't end up with that cuz while you're laying out stuff and placing all these parts, you're conscious of how you got it in your head of how much general area you've got available and things like that. So you might start off with a floor plan. uh, layout where you just go through and you don't worry about route, you just get it to throw down the chips, you might group them into, you know, sections and just see that it's all going to fit on the board.

and well, if it doesn't, you might have to plead your case for a double-sided loaded board for example. but in this case, hey, they got away with it. Lots of stuff, very high. Den You might have to go to another.

you might have said well, okay, we're going to shoot for a six layer board, but you might have gone. sorry, we need eight layers or something like that to get the routing density required. I Don't know. this one's probably a six layer board.

You're not going to get this on a uh, four layer. Board Of course, because, well, you're going to have a ground plane and a power plane in there over the whole thing. As I said this thing almost entirely. 5 Vols I Don't see any other power on there.

Uh, we've got the one little power circuitry down the bottom, power input, filtering, and fusing uh, down here. and then when you're relying on just one big 5volt digital plane and that's where a job like this is really quite nice. When you got that plane over the whole thing, you don't have to worry about splitting planes and routing layers like you do in modern boards. For example: Le You've got a modern Fpga.

It needs five different freaking power supplies and you got to Route the things all over the board and it's a nightmare these days. I Love the days when you just had a single ground playe. everything was just 5 volts or or you did all 3.3 or something like that was just much easier. Today's ones real pain in the ass.

With all the multiple layers, multiple uh, ones, local regulation, all sorts of things, it's really ugly. It's really quite nice and therapeutic to lay out a big 5vt only board like this. and just to prove there's nothing up my sleeve, look this dense board Tada bugger all on the bottom. just your bypassing look at that.

So that is a beautiful job to physically fit all of the parts on that board and get that routed in what you know, six layers or whatever it is. Fantastic job. And last but certainly not least, we have finally a little bit more, uh, interest. Once again, this is the 7020 board.

This is the switchable IO board. so this stuff is the one that does the 422 uh processing and all that sort of jazz. Couple of daughter boards on here, this one plugged into there. we got another one that plugs into here.

but and we've got bit of coax running down there. Look at that. that isn't a bodge, that's actually purpose design. They've run that coax.

they need to get it from there over to there. Oh I can't take it all the way on there in a different layer screw. Don't want to dedicate a whole another couple of layers to the board just to route that over. We'll use a bit of cow ax thank you very much and this board is pretty rare in that look.

It does have localized power around here for something, so obviously one specific thing required its own power supply. and that's what they've done here. But apart from that, everything's powered from the one one rail, the one power plane. We got ourselves a reference Sig here.

so reference Signal generator I Guess generating a reference video signal perhaps and something you may have picked up on all of these boards is that they have a dip arrow and I've explained this on previous videos. This means the board travels that way Pigs In Space travels that way through the uh dip Reflow Solder Barath. So it's got the wave soldering uh process and that does any through hole. Parts Like these ceramic hybrids up here, they would all be wave soldered from the bottom.

And check this out. This board has two bodgers on it. This is the first one. Look, they couldn't get that surface mount cap there.

so they've put in a separate one like that and they've gunked it down. Radial cap in there. Why have they done that? I Don't know. Even worse.

Oops. Looks like they've probably got some sort of Pull-Up mod here. They've got just a leaded resistor there on this um alter CPL here. So yeah, likely something was giving them probably a you know, they might have left a pin floating or something like that giving them a pain in the ass and they had to pull it up.

Perhaps that would be my guess and given that this is the main IO Board Of course you'd expect this to be where the Dax and Adcs are those high quality 10bit Dax and Adc's to uh, sample uh, the video signal and to Output it reconvert it from the digital back into the analog. but I can't find any sort of you know Analog Devices part or anything like that. all custom Sony part numbered pain in the ass so yeah, sorry I can't really show you anything unless I go through and Google every single part number again. you can do that to your heart's content cuz the highres photos are up on the website Evev blog.com so you can just check them out and well you can try and find them yourself.

If you do, hey, link them in I'm going to crowdsource it. We got something a little bit out of the usual here. We got ourselves little Crystal oscillator modules here. couldn't find any info on that CDX 1312 chip there unfortunately.

So that section D1 D2 Signal generator. So yeah, some sort of reference. uh, signal generator. something like that I don't know to sort of get the system in the mood for doing things, so to speak.

I Don't know. You'd have to look at the overall block diagram of the entire board. Shame we don't have those though cuz that would explain a lot. Weird little sections like this single chip, one Fvc what is that? eff I don't know.

Um, freeze memory I don't think it's Phas frame memory because well, where does the Zed come from I don't know. Bizarre once again. yeah. you need more detailed info on all this sort of stuff and this board.

eh, who knows what that does. That's a rare double-sided load actually. look at that and a tiny little 3v generator. Oh, it's Lonesome Once again, is it actually 3vs or is it 3.3 Eh.

So there you have it. That is the last of the boards. and well, that got a bit monotonous in the end there. Unbelievable.

I Don't know what that second missing board was? Doesn't matter, but the amount of systems engineering that goes into that. How many how many design hours, how many designer hours went into that is just absolutely ridiculous. But that's the kind of complexity you get with this PR level gear that you never see, you never hear of. and you know there's probably hundreds of people working on on a product like this.

Unbelievable. You know, from Go To Wo not to me and that's just the hardware side of things, let alone all the software and the firmware on each individual board and other stuff. and the user interface and the all the effects and everything else to work out. the algorithms for all the stuff.

and oh man. Unbelievable. And power supply time. Look at this.

They've even put a little finger hold on that and that just slides out. Oh, look at that. No. I was wrong about the big uh Toid.

Completely and utterly wrong. Wow. Look at that. That's a beast.

Enormous. nice, big common mode Line Filter on the input. Great start. Look at that.

That thing would have cost a fortune in it on its own, made in Japan of course. And there's the Big Ass connector going over to the back plane that's powering all of these boards. so that would be carrying. you know, like 50 amps total or something like that.

50 60 amps? Easy total. And clearly we have here is a Big Ass Switch mode. uh, converter with individual switch mode blocks like this. Main: Basically, we' got the Main's input over here from the filter.

We got some extra looks like a a common mode filter. here. we got some input protection with some Ms I think no, no, that's actually some more uh filtering and then got the main filter cap. So basically, uh, where was the yeah, that's that's obviously not the bridge rectifier.

No, haven't found the the Bridge rectifier yet. So I don't know. maybe? ah, maybe it's this. this is our input brid.

this is probably our input Bridge rectifier here. this is our main. Uh 450 Vol 7 470 microfarad uh filter cap. So converting Main's input, rectifying it, converting directly to DC nice angling there on the nice artistic angling on the fuses there.

I Rather like that. Neat. and uh then from the high voltage. DC we just got these are just DC to DC converter bricks whether they're off the shelf or whether or not they're actually designed and built by.

Sony I Don't know, we might have to. uh, take the take some screws out there and have a look aha, look at it Lambda modules. There you go. They're pretty much the Rolls-Royce of DC DC converter modules.

They don't come much better than Lambda So there you go. That one I thought might have been the bridge rectifier at first glance. Um, no, it's got a VN V control. So yeah, I'm not sure what's going on there and no surprises for guessing.

We're not going to see anything in these modules unless we desoldered them cracked apart. They're probably even potted uh inside. Perhaps all we get is a big SE out on there. if we take the heat sink off.

These things are uh. dip package through hole package solded directly down to the board. Bummer. I'm not going to destroy the power supply just to have a look inside a a Lambda DC to DC converter.

sorry. Well, that is totally not what I thought I Thought that would be a one big DC to DC uh conver Mur In which case, you'd expect the Main's input. You'd have a big ass rectifier here. some big ass filtering caps like we get here and well, you know these are just DC to DC converter bricks.

but I Cannot for the life of me find any sort of uh Bridge rectifier in this thing. It's certainly, you know, not the I can't even find any rectifier, let alone one big enough for the power we're talking about here. So I don't know. It's rather perplexing.

The only thing left to consider is that these are actually not DC to DC converters. They're uh, AC todc uh bricks and converting directly on the mains and each output. They're probably they like these three might be identical or 5 volts or something like that and they're just separating them out. uh, for example, and driving different pins on the connector over here with each one, perhaps.

But why? they've uh, got, um, the Big Ass 450 volt, uh, 470 microf cap here and here I don't know h Ah, there we go. I Found it on one of the big bricks here. There you go. Output 360 Vols DC 1.4 amps and looks like an additional one at 2.1 amps as well.

There you go. That's why we've got two big Ass filter caps on this thing. Looks like we've got two different outputs and uh, that's our Uh 240 volt AC to high voltage DC converter and then once again. so that's that one over there and then once again.

As I said, these are probably then high voltage d DC to low voltage DC to converter bricks there for various things and going over to the power supply. So that is a brilliant power supply. Very nice indeed. Yeah, I was way off The Mark with the uh toid uh thing.

Clearly you know it wasn't going to be big enough to power power this beast, that's for sure. They really needed to do a switch mod converter here to get the efficiency and they've done it really well. I mean these are: Lambda Lambda Lambda Lambda No. Look at these lovely little straps.

Look at that attention to detail to hold down that wire. They've got another one over there as well. You can see that little hooking there. Beautiful.

Look It's even. they've even heat shrunk that over that tab with the it mounted on the board. Oh, brings a tear to the eye now. I have taken the lid off here, but unfortunate.

It's probably going to be a bit of work to get into the back panel board which is mounted down in here and also the back connector board. and I I sorry, but I don't think it's worth the effort to strip this thing down. I've already spent enough hours on this bloody tear down already and uh yeah, we're not going to see anything hugely interesting with there's one big black back plane board there connecting everything together I'm not as I said. I'm not sure if they're all parallel connected and you can just put the boards in any order willy-nilly or whether or not I think they are in specific things cuz that's what the manual uh tells you.

there is a specific order.