Hi Welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones 30,000 bucks worth of brand new Tectronics Mdo 4000 series Ofos scope. You know what we say here on the EV blog. Don't turn it on, Take it apart.

That back case came off incredibly easily. and here's the um uh, flip out feet mechanism. They just use a metal lever bar there and that works quite well I like it and I got all bit I'm very impressed with the uh metal shielding on there, just like in the Agilant ones. It's beautiful I like it and uh, you can see the power supply.

well, there's some here. There's a huge metal black metal heat sink down in there, the massive uh fan on the back here which we'll look at and uh, very, very well shielded I like it. It looks pretty easy to take apart with some Torx screws, so let's give it a go. And there it is that came apart relatively easily.

Quite a few uh, torque screws and a few uh Jack nuts and uh, and the BNC nuts. but uh, apart from that, it's uh, it came apart fairly smoothly I Was quite impressed. Now there's actually quite a few rather interesting aspects to the building. This thing I Think it's rather interesting.

let's take a closer look. One of the first things I noticed is the Um is the Uh Arrangement here of these uh, clampdowns, uh bars for the various heat sinks Here, there's um, each heat sink has got one so they except for The ones under the bottom here, which are on a lower board down there. and uh, they're they're rather, uh, interesting. They haven't just gone for the thermal adhesive, they've actually gone for these.

uh These Bars So I'm proing the uh, that yellow stuff under there and it's uh, it's thermal paste or uh, maybe even thermal adhesive I don't know, uh, what theyve usews there, but uh, presumably if we try and take off those uh heat sinks I don't think we're going to, uh, be able to see the chip NS numbers under there and they're custom anyway. so I don't think I'll uh I'll bother to do that. but uh, yeah, it's just rather interesting that they've gone to that much effort to hold them on there. Now if we take a look at the Uh power supply here, of course it's It's uh, a top quality one.

it's from Emison uh networks. You can see that right up in the top in there. and uh, it's They're doing all the right things. It's a high quality power supply, as you'd expect.

And for the main Supply output here, they solded those directly onto the board with, uh, multiple Um cables so they're not mucking around there. They haven't bothered using the connector, really. uh, Solar connection. There's a connection down on the main board of course, and there's a smaller one up here that's probably for some auxiliary voltage or some power monitoring or something like that.

Um, as with the agilant, there's got to be a feedback uh button to uh from the soft uh start circuit to switch this power supply off and on. or at least switch the output off and on anyway. and they've dispensed with that mounting hardware here. Of course they're just using uh, some uh thermal pads here to attach it to the Uh back heat sink here, and same on the top side as well.

I Find this very curious indeed. There's a second board up in here which we'll take a look at and it's got the all the rear panel connectors. But look at this little connector here. It's got two leads coming out which then go down into the active and the neutral.

they're actually H heat shrunk into. they're actually put inside the heat shrink and then they go down the active and neutral and then they actually, uh, terminate just here. So they're like a sense to pick up the Main's Uh frequency is is that for the Main's sink? I I Wonder what the Main's are Trigger Or something like that? perhaps? I Don't know. It's very interesting and curiously, they've got this PCI connector down on the main board down there and it actually connects into the Uh rear panel connector board up there.

and it's got the Uh Ethernet and the VGA and the Um Uh auxiliary coax outputs in the USB and stuff like that. and it's got the USB on the front and the back. You can actually see the ones on the Uh on the front panel here and they connect through to the same ones on the back. That's quite a novel um uh technique to actually uh, get bought like those USB ones.

I Would have expected them to just uh Mount them on the main board so that they protruded out the front. but I guess they uh decided to consolidate it into the CH same uh chipset and once again, the shielding's taken care of with these little uh spring um uh, Shield Clips down in here. So when you press the two halves of the case together, um, the Uh shielding uh meets and makes uh good contact and that's how you get get good um uh, EMC immunity and down in this corner here uh, my guess would be that is a JTAG connector. uh, you know, dual row 10 pins I Reckon that's it.

Hack away and there's H some sort of switch there. probably some sort of reset switch and obviously all of of the DC Todc converter stuff for the lower rails is all done on the main board. Here, there's this huge heat sink. there's probably some voltage Regulators on the bottom side of the board there.

There's lots of a ton of uh, large inductors there and filter cap. so uh yeah, that's a dead giveaway. And that circuitry there is obviously for the logic analyzer dead giveaway. And from the logic analyzer circuitry there, you can see the controlled impedance traces going up to the main device up here with that SD ram surrounding it.

But curiously, that's the only major device on the board which doesn't have a heat sink on it. so uh, obviously it's uh, it doesn't get that hot. it's obviously a cool process or isn't uh, running that quick and that's um, a tech custom one made by National Semiconductor and my guess would be this one here is the main Uh processor. that, uh, sort of runs all the operating system and everything because it looks like all the backpedal interface devices with the USB and everything all flow into that.

So I wonder what, uh, what? they're actually running there I don't know I'd have to take the heat sink off to find out, but uh, that's a bit hard so we'll have to, uh, wait until Tectronics tell us or living wonder And those two labeled, uh, firmware flash devices are a dead giveaway. They're right next to the Uh Applications processor there and that huge device up the top there. that's uh, pretty much the biggest Uh device on the board. It's the Big Daddy and uh, it seems to, uh, tie into, um, all those other A6 on the left hand side of it.

And here we have uh, six devices which are clearly, uh, separated into uh, basically, uh, two channels. That's why we um, found that effect when when we actually reviewed it, we uh, saw that if you switch on more than two channels, then it, uh, its um. update uh. performance actually haves.

so um, uh, there's obviously uh, two devices or three devices per two channels. um, there's I don't know. one's probably I'm not sure if they're the ADC on top because I'm uh, tempted to think that the ADC is down on the bottom board and that's what those heat sinks down. Those four heat sinks, down the bottom, which actually protrude through the top board.

They're mounted down on the bottom board. so I suspect, uh, they're probably the analog to digital uh converters and down in here. That package down in there is, uh, the main 10 MHz it's reference oscillator and that's done by Fox Um, and they're a, you know, a big manufacturer of high quality. um High stability.

In this case, it' be a very high stability one. uh, you know, very low Jitter that sort of thing. So uh, you obviously need that when you're talking about, uh, these sort of um, sample rates and up the top. Here, it looks like we got some uh, Micron branded what looks like uh, memory I I Can only assume uh, the number is, uh, not familiar at all.

So uh, but they are, um, obviously coupled into these. uh, heat sunk Asic up here. so, um, presumably sample memory. And there's the bottom of the main uh board.

Now there's a uh, there's some more um of this Micron memory down the bottom here. Another buttload of that and uh I thought there was a device on this. sold it onto this side of the board. another BGA device but that isn't populated.

um as the same with the surrounding components there. There's nothing on the top side. no components. No.

BGA device. So I wonder what that one is I don't know. Uh, there's the rest of your logic uh, analyzer circuitry. and there's your logic analyzer.

um, input input connector on the uh front panel. Um, there's some extra uh SD ram around here. Um, and really, there's uh, not a huge amount. uh, else.

And there's the backside of all your uh DC Todc converter circuitry under that uh heat sink and you can see the three screws on there. that, uh, screw the heat sink onto the front of the board and the USB controller is actually on that back board. There, it's a Smsc USB 2514 There you go. So uh, it wasn't actually on the front and uh, that's a rather interesting uh board.

It's a rather unusual construction and there is a uh, there's a battery on there. There's a Lithium battery for the uh, time and date, and the fan is an absolute uh monster. It's a SEO deny one so they haven't skimped there on the brand. but uh.

overall, all the cooling's not bad on this. What the fan does, is it actually, uh, um, sucks air in from the outside, sucks it in. which then the only way uh out is to pass across the power supply and the top of the main board which will be uh facing down in here as well. and all the that that uh big black DC to DC converter heat sck we saw and out the cage here.

So that's not a bad thermal design at all. and I was right on the money with those heat sinks which protrude through to the the top side of the board. they're obviously the analog to digital uh converters. If you look closely in there, you can see the controlled impedance uh traces coming out of them to these highspeed connectors which actually connect through to the top side of the board.

And of course they're our, um, uh, they're our front ends, our vertical uh, front ends under the shielded uh cans and they're uh, solded down to the board. so unfortunately we won't be able to, uh, take those off today. And curiously, over here we have um, a connector which goes nowhere that's obviously for uh, testing, programming, diagnostic purposes, whatever. and of course all of the magic.

The new RF magic happens under this huge shielded, um, custom, uh, diecast metal box. Awesome. And for fans of power supplies, here it is. And here's the backboard in closer detail and you can see those wires coming off that connector and going down into the mains wiring like that and then just terminating right there on the end of the Um just before the connector.

And let's have a pan over the bottom side of the main board. Board here looks like a JTAG once again, a 5x2 and uh, the date code 20th Week 2011 And behold, there it is! We have the bottom of the ADC board and you'll notice the Uh Serpentine controlled impedance tracers running around here like crazy. We have a rather curious device here that obviously has some firmware on it. that's the only reason it it have that sticker I wonder what it is and let's go for a tour of the backs side of our ADC we our Bnc's already screwed into there I won't bother uh, taking those out, there'll be nothing of note under there.

and uh, we have that um, uh device which is obviously uh, programmable, maybe some sort of micro or something? I don't know. they're the backside of the BGA For the Um 4 channel analog to digital converter, there's four separate devices that looks like, uh, some sort of um, uh, localized power supply for the ADC Probably a low noise? Supply uh, what else have we got? Um, not sure what that sort of stuff is there, just some miscellaneous. so there's obviously a um, espresso oscillator there. Uh, so maybe that's some sort of local oscillator and we got our magic can there.

There's obviously some real black magic going on under that, and uh, some other miscellaneous stuff. Let's see if we can take off the Um RF Shield Oh, here we go. This is exciting stuff. This will be pornographic.

What under here? Oh, you don't do a big D solid dast metal thing like this on, uh, on an RF Spectrum metalize without having some magic under here. Let's lift the skirt up. Taada. Oh beautiful.

Oh, this sort of stuff just brings a tear to the eye. Oh real RF engineering. It's just a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I'm not RF guy.

so I won't even begin to explain what's going on here cuz I'd probably be talking out my ass really. uh, there's a, um, a high filter here and a low filter. everything on here, by the way you see is a transmission line. This is serious business.

All right. this is absolutely serious. Let's start with the RF connector up here. I mean that is some dodgy looking, uh soldering? I'm not too impressed with that.

I mean granted, it's under a big whopping, uh ground plane and it's a big N connector. but I don't know I expect it a bit better than that. but I guess it's good enough and the connector leads down into this, uh, off-the-shelf uh can device I don't recognize the Uh manufacturer there. It's uh, probably a manufacturer of uh, Precision RF uh components and uh, there's not much else surrounding that and that leads down into the these devices uh down here which then are uh, cascaded like that all the way through down to this bottom circuitry and here it is.

It brings us in and this is a little uh Transformer there as you can see some sort of Chip I don't know some sort of uh passive component surrounding it and then the output of that branches off up here and then splits into your high and your low uh filter there which then go across into here. it's like a little mini RAC track. It's brilliant and it also uh splits off down here which goes all the way over all the way over all the way over through some circuitry there, all the way over to more circuitry over there and then it splits again and goes all around. Ah, try and follow this baby.

Love to see the schematic I guess the RF fans and all the hand out there are drooling themselves right about now. when it comes out of there it goes up here and it goes into this uh, ferite surrounded um some sort of I don't know. Is it some sort of delay line wave guide I don't know I have no idea what that is? um some sort of Transformer who knows I got no idea RF experts will tell me and uh tell me uh how obvious all this circuitry is. One thing I Do know though, it's just beautiful.

It really is. And of course you're not going to get cross talk with anything with this custom designed huge diecast Um shield with all of the Uh traces all the matching traces cut out of it. Beautiful. That's how you get zero cross talk and zero interference on a in a good quality.

IRS Spectrum analyzer for and the cam we saw on the top side of the board is uh for this Uh device here which obviously has to um have a cutout in in the board so well you can't just uh, let all the uh Magic Escape so you got to Shield it on the other side with the can. but apart from that everything else was uh, shielded by the uh copper layers of the board and by the Um by the diecast shielding can and you can bet your bottom dollar that ain't regular F4 material either. What that? Now the big test. Will it actually boot? Let's see, it's going through the motions, it's making the noises, screen's working, but uh, we're going to have to wait a minute and a half to find out and look at.

that works like a Bol one. What were you worried about? Tectronics? Yeah.