Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.

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OwO:
As someone who's worked closely with small corporations that are actually selling to hobbyists, I can say from observation that there is a single absolutely most important thing that the market cares about, which is bang for buck. An example to look at is the FNIRSI-5012H. Even with absolutely shit software people still keep buying it, and someone on this forum is even working on replacement firmware for it, completely on his own dime! Now imagine if it came with primitive but open source software, people would be on it even faster. In the end value/price is what matters.

ogden:

--- Quote from: OwO on January 14, 2020, 03:24:47 am ---In the end value/price is what matters.

--- End quote ---
Sure. How do you define value of the scope? Just number of oscilloscopes per buck or what? If we take in account: scope bandwidth, number of channels, ease of use, physical controls, software, gui, screen size, safety and so on, most likely winner will be some low-end Owon, Rigol or alike. As we already (hopefully) agreed, open source/crowdfunding approach can't compete in this league.

OwO:
The OP's intent is offering more raw performance per buck, so mainly bandwidth, analog performance, sample memory, trigger POI, etc. That or offer DS1054Z level data acquisition functionality for less than $100. I think these are all doable. I have some basic idea of what kind of ADC prices you can get in volume and am already starting negotiations. But it's still up to our parent company whether they want to take the risk on a new product like this.

ogden:

--- Quote from: OwO on January 14, 2020, 04:04:58 am ---The OP's intent is offering more raw performance per buck, so mainly bandwidth, analog performance, sample memory, trigger POI, etc. That or offer DS1054Z level data acquisition functionality for less than $100. I think these are all doable.

--- End quote ---
100$? Are you sure? :)

If result is Zynq FPGA + >=500Msps ADC + >=2 100MHz channels + I/O similar to rPI (Ethernet, USB, HDMI, parallel LCD) with basic scope software that supports variable screen resolutions, I'm in with my 100$ even if LCD is not supplied. Price point of ScopeFun IMHO is fail for hobby market, yet they somehow got enough backers. You never know  :-//

[edit0] For extra 50$ "advanced version" with buffered 16x logic input and 1x 50 Ohm + PGA/Attenuator for "mixed signal" and direct RF sampling SDR and Spectrum Analyzer functionality. - It may go like hot cakes then.

[edit1] Forgot to mention that it must run Linux - for better acceptance from open source community. With Linux you may get some "other customers" - because it can be used as low cost sampler as well.

David Hess:

--- Quote from: DaJMasta on January 09, 2020, 08:25:38 am ---There are also virtually no scopes that use a single SoC solution for the whole thing.  You get the ADC, the memory controller/triggering, the sample memory, and then the SoC running the display and stuff.  We've got good availability on SoCs for the application software, ADCs (to some degree), and memory.... so it's the triggering/channel timing/memory controller ASIC that's the real missing link in my mind.
--- End quote ---

Most modern DSOs implement triggering digitally after the digitizer in parallel with the memory controller essentially making it free.  The only reason to include a dedicated trigger circuit is to support equivalent time sampling.


--- Quote from: blueskull on January 13, 2020, 12:58:23 pm ---4. Equally important is analog frontend. That's the difference between a good scope and a cheap scope. With the same ADC, an R&S scope is quieter than a Rigol, here's the difference. Quoting from PicoScope, some scopes are built down to a cost, ours are built up to a spec.
--- End quote ---

Do you mean Picotech?  If so that is funny coming from them when they use integrated CMOS broadband preamplifiers from TI with 1000 nV/SqrtHz noise.


--- Quote from: blueskull on January 13, 2020, 12:58:23 pm ---3. What I see that makes the difference between commodity and high end is input sample and hold chip. With a good S/H chip, you can get tens of GHz of BW using sampling scope technology, or massive array of 1Gsps ADCs to achieve realtime. This is the secret sauce part of mainstream players.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: Mechatrommer on January 13, 2020, 02:25:15 pm ---lets forget sampling scope which can be done with KSps or MSps ADC at tens of GHz BW, its different beast people have done it at cheap.
--- End quote ---

I disagree.  It will be very difficult to compete on performance but modern DSOs are missing a lot of useful features which would be cheap to add besides a sane user interface which does not make me want to puke.

1. Real time network analysis, not just sweeping a sine wave while you get coffee, should be included if a waveform generator is included.  Check out Cleverscope and the market they cater to.  Is a magnitude/phase FFT and noise marker too much to ask?  Apparently it is.

2. If separate trigger hardware is included for equivalent time sampling, then it is a small addition to add true sampling capability with a separate auxiliary 50 ohm input.  Or if digital triggering is used, the digitizer can be used as part of a centroid timing or transition midpoint timing time delay counter for picosecond resolution.  A 100 or 200 MHz DSO would be greatly enhanced with low performance 4 to 8 GHz *random* sampling capability.


--- Quote from: blueskull on January 13, 2020, 12:58:23 pm ---AFE for high end (50 ohm) scope is quite simple, i guess anyone can do with a free EM simulator and proper PCB materials... but once the signal goes into the ADC/DSP/ASIC/whatever it is, thats where the massive array of money is... there are few of them, from ADC/AFE to DSP/ASIC to RAM down the line, those the unobtaniums...
--- End quote ---

The low impedance part of the signal path is much easier than the high impedance part because the later requires a good substrate which does not suffer from excessive hook.  This is why you find high quality oscilloscopes with plastic substrates for the high impedance attenuators and modern DSOs and high voltage differential probes with bad transient response after a couple years because the FR4 substrate they used absorbed water.

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