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Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: excitedbox on January 09, 2020, 05:59:28 am ---The big reason in my opinion is price though. Scopes and test equipment cost insane amounts of money.

--- End quote ---

I don't think you've got this right. Today's low-end scopes can be found in the $200-$300 range and still have pretty "impressive" specs (I consider designing a 1Gsps scope impressive even to this day).
There's very little way you can do better than this price-wise especially if you don't have the "weight" of a big player (to get ultra good deals on all critical components, to be able to pull off selling with very low margins, etc.)

I think that's the recurring DIY syndrome issue. You always start thinking how much cheaper you can do it than COTS, and it rarely ends up that way.

unitedatoms:
I will start believe in Kickstart projects for ASIC if there was a prior history of successful lesser projects. Say some FPGA based Kickstarter, then rerun, then it became more and more established and popular.

May be there is an example of small groups rolling their asics. Look at the Parallax Propeller 2, some analog chip "THAT 2151" rolled for music synthesizers community, so there is a hope.

I think ASIC on Kickstarter is possible, but only after some meaningful transparent history of lesser successes.
SiliconWizard:
Regarding just the ASIC thing. If it's a purely digital design, and can be prototyped (even if at lower clock frequencies) on FPGAs, this could stand a small chance. There's a number of companies that offer services to get an ASIC from your HDL, so if the project gets enough traction and funding, that could be doable. (Whether/when it would become cost-effective is another story.)

Now if it contains anything analog, that's a completely different league and story. You'd need to pre-select a given node process, get enough guarantees you could prototype this through the corresponding manufacturer, get access to the PDK AND the design tools... and of course get microelectronics engineers onboard, that know what they're doing... that's almost impossible IMO. You could first start through MPW, and try to get access to the tools for "cheap" through some kind of education/small company deal, but then getting up to scale later would probably be out of the question entirely. And even if you get to the point of a few ASIC prototypes (that's what you'd get through MPW, something in the 15-20 usually), you'll need a lot of resource to properly test them...

Microelectronics is a f*cking expensive activity. The only remotely realistic endeavor would be my first point IMO (purely digital stuff through a fabless company getting your design to silicon).

T3sl4co1l:
There's no market for oscilloscope ASICs. ???

You could gather a bigger market by making a more general device.

But general purpose devices already exist: analog front ends, fast ADCs, SoCs and FPGAs for continuous, burst, SDR and ET sampling, and waveform analysis.  Which are indeed what a lot of scopes already use, and for good reason.  :)

Or -- how about a campaign to write an OS for Rigol or other cheap scopes?  The ones with ASICs (Rigol) may not be very practical to rewrite (a proper careful reverse-engineering of the software or hardware may be necessary to understand their interfaces), but the more general ones using off-the-shelf parts should be relatively straightforward to trace and build from the bottom up.

Tim
Lukas:
Wondering why nobody mentioned the RFSoCs yet. Kinda on the pricy side, but you'd get 8(!) 4GSa/s ADCs and a CPU beefy enough to run the user interface.
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