Author Topic: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.  (Read 19204 times)

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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #25 on: January 09, 2020, 09:29:00 pm »
I really should not have to explain why you do not develop a semiconductor in 1 thread on a message board but ok. :palm:

To eliminate 70% of the posts repeating "you will never fit the budget" from the nay sayers with 1 zero experience, 2 not the slightest knowledge of what is and is not possible, 3 don´t understand the project. Out of 17 Replies since yesterday only about 3-4 were in any way shape or form productive. You can´t develope a product on an open forum with 1000s of people who are not involved throwing their opinions into the mix. I know I am no expert and I don´t pretend to be but I have done some research and don´t need to reply to 20 people that misunderstood the original intent and have done no research but are making claims as facts.

Also can´t work a project with only one communication thread and maintain any organization.
There will have to be Non disclosures signed etc. for Design Kits so certain things can´t be public.
Sharing confidential info and files.

I think those are enough valid reasons that your question has been answered. This thread can still be used for outsiders to throw their 2 cents in but this is not a place to get work done.

This is not directed at you so don`t feel attacked this is just a general notice to downers.

If you don´t think it is possible keep it to yourself, it is not helpful. If you have a suggestion how to improve it or a valid concern that is great I would love to hear it. If you say I would rather have this feature instead of that feature Super. Just saying it wont work or it is not what anybody wants doesn't help because apparently at least someone wants it since several people have expressed interest including me.

As stated before the economies do work because these companies can even afford to keep the manufacturing quantities even lower by not selling the chips publicly. The most expensive part is the NRE after that they can enjoy huge margins.

A few years ago people would have said you could never afford a 3d printer. they cost 10s of thousands. the Makerbot drove the price down and now they cost a couple $. Same with Arduino, Arm SOCs and everything else. People need to get out of this boxed in mind set that these things can only be done by big companies. Especially on this forum people should understand that.

 

Offline magic

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #26 on: January 09, 2020, 09:36:36 pm »
I want to produce a cheaper solution to making scopes and it is a FACT that these asics do just that. If you are a manufacturer buying FPGAs and ADCs right now, you can just as well purchase an ASIC to combine those things. With free access to the basic framework for the software your development costs drop even more.
There is a certain counterbalancing factor, which is that not everybody wants to be a manufacturer of glorified reference boards ;)

Chances are that established players would rather collectively boycott you and shut you down with patents. They have their own special snowflake SOCs, IPs and "differentiating" features which they aren't sharing with anyone. But you could target the sort of vendors who make all those PCB modules sold on AliBay, if you get it to the level of "route BNC jack to pin 1 and read capture data over SPI from pin 2, pin 3 is ground and 4 is VCC, please bypass with 100nF".
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #27 on: January 09, 2020, 10:04:10 pm »

.......................

If we make a chip for up to 1Ghz and 4-5Gsps using interleaving on 1 channel that would bring the cost of the scopes used by over 50% of the market down to something affordable.

................
Happening already:
https://siglentna.com/product/sds5104x-1-ghz-4-ch/


I don't see 7k as affordable. Although it is great to see prices coming down. That just proves the points I have been making though. 1 siglent is a budget brand. 2 they were selling all those upgrades for over 2k before even though you already had the hardware.
3. Why can Feelelec give you a signal generator where the HW + Software costs 1/5th as much as their software upgrade. Why can the DreamLabs sell you a logic analyzer for $80 with the HW and Software and they charge several hundred for just the software upgrade.


The Rigol 4000 or 5000 I forget which one, costs $900 for the base model but over $4000 with all upgrades. That means it contains under $500 worth of parts. Is it really justified to charge almost 1000% for the software that has no repeat cost associated with it?




Magic- I don´t expect the big manufacturers to use the chip they already have their own. You will see a lot more companies like Hantek, MCH etc spring up though. That is who I expect to be interested in this. Maybe Siglent and a few other smaller manufacturers.

That is exactly the direction this should go in. Just like those DDS chips from Analog that allow people to build a signal generator. You brush off those modules, but the difference between a lot of them and a product from Siglent, etc. Is a plastic case and a little more refined software and user interface.

There are also other products that could benefit from easy access to signal capture and processing without the added development associated with an FPGA. Imagine what you could do if you had an STM32 or ESP32 and access to high speed signal capture and processing. You would have to interface with the chip over SPI or even faster interface but also with a DDR or SRAM for the captured signal.
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #28 on: January 09, 2020, 10:09:49 pm »

There is a certain counterbalancing factor, which is that not everybody wants to be a manufacturer of glorified reference boards ;)

Chances are that established players would rather collectively boycott you and shut you down with patents. They have their own special snowflake SOCs, IPs and "differentiating" features which they aren't sharing with anyone.

That is like saying that Apple will boycott me if I try to design an OS. There is nothing that Apple needs from me but other companies who sell computers might want a good free OS that gives them the same stuff as the big players.

Also your counterbalancing factor is what all these companies like Hantek etc. are doing.

 

Offline mikeselectricstuff

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #29 on: January 09, 2020, 10:16:27 pm »
Above 2Gsps forget it.
How many people
1) need >2Gsps
2) would be interested in a hugely risky Kickstarter
3) can't afford one of the many tried and tested off-the-shelf scopes?
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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #30 on: January 09, 2020, 10:31:31 pm »
That is why we need industry support. Hantek, MCH, Siglent, Picoscope, Voltcraft. Developing their own Asic might be out of the range of each of them individually but if they each only have to put up 5-10% they might be willing to invest. They would be the ones benefiting the most from it in the end and in the grand scheme of things is 50k no that much to invest in the future of their business. You have to remember that all their competitors now have their own chips so they are falling behind.

As technology gets better signals have gotten faster and there are more of them. People used to be excited about 20MHZ analog scopes but now that is considered a useless toy scope.


The reason they can each use the same chip is the same reason they can use the same FPGA or ADCs etc now. One company might use 1 asic for 4 "slow" channels while picoscope uses 4 asics to give you the maximum bandwidth and sampling speed on each channel. One company might decide to use a USB2.0 while another uses USB 3.0 or USB C or Ethernet, or Wireless, One uses a touch screen while the other uses knobs and buttons. All those feature differences will be controlled through the ARM processor though which is separate from the ASIC.

When you look at the Asic as a complex signal capturing chip just as you would use a ADC to get your signals in another project you see that they really are not all developing the same products in the end. It is just 1 small piece of the product that will be the same. Just as in the computer industry there are only a couple CPU architectures but OEMs don´t all have the same laptops.

 

Online thm_w

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #31 on: January 09, 2020, 11:21:44 pm »
The Rigol 4000 or 5000 I forget which one, costs $900 for the base model but over $4000 with all upgrades. That means it contains under $500 worth of parts. Is it really justified to charge almost 1000% for the software that has no repeat cost associated with it?

MSO5072 costs $909, has 8GS/s stock and likely 10Gs/s capability built in. You'd be better off buying that and hacking the front end to 1GHz.
The cheapest siglent is $2,900 and has 5Gs/s, so there is no comparison here in terms of raw performance.

The thing is though, with that ASIC, they are using the same chip in their $10,000+ oscilloscopes. So you get payback from those sales which recovers the initial NRE of designing the original ASIC. Its the same with keysight, except they kept the ASIC in their high-end scopes for years then eventually trickled down to the low end. Rigol would probably sell you the ASIC, if you weren't building a competing product, and they'd probably charge you $500+ per piece.

When you just build the low end model, and sell it for $900, you have no ability to recover those NRE costs.
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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #32 on: January 10, 2020, 12:20:10 am »
that 8gsps is on 4 channels which you cant use all of at 70mhz. to use the full bandwidth and sampling you need all the upgrades which brings the price to over 4k. That scope is an outlier and when it came out I was surprised. Rigol was celebrated for releasing that scope for such an affordable price. Rigol is not as bad as the other companies when it comes to their base models because they are hackable. But the upgrades are still over priced.

You could also say Hantek makes affordable scopes so this isn`t needed. These are all excuses. Companies like Hantek have given us a good product at an affordable price which is why they don´t have the budget to develop their own chips. I for one would have no problem investing a couple hundred knowing that it will allow them to continue doing so at an even better price to performance. Think of it this way If 2000 people each paid $250, (Before people misinterpret that again. NO I don´t expect 2k people to do that) any budget manufacturer could give you 8gsps scopes for $900 like Rigol can but with all features unlocked from the start. Not having to pay another $3500 for all the upgrades. Last year that $900 MSO cost $4500 fully unlocked. That is the price difference that is possible. Also keep in mind that hacking the scope is piracy and is illegal because that is a software license they are selling you.

1. Multiple companies using the same chip spreads costs. (This seems to be the hardest for people to understand. People keep acting like this is going in only 1 product)
2. Manufacturing costs are tiny in comparison. (AMD pays less than $13 for a CPU made on the MOST expensive node while this will be one of the cheapest. A qty discount can only go so far since there are still set costs such as materials and EUV is very slow)
3. Companies offer shit software and locked down systems.
4. This chip has other uses other than Scopes.
5. These features are not set in stone. (I said in my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 8th post that we would need to see what makes sense.)
6. Scopes are multi year products. Meaning 1 chip will be sold over several years. (if 1% of scopes use this chip that means over 1 million units in 5-7 years.)
7. We don´t have any of the facts yet and nothing is set in stone there is no way to determine if it REALLY makes sense until you look at the math.
8. This is not going to happen through a kickstarter. The title was hyperbolic to say that these OS scope kickstarters are misplaced because they can`t compete with an ASIC. (should have been clear from my first post. Where I outlined in detail forming a foundation and going to companies for support).

I know this comes off as harsh but I feel like I am talking to a wall. People keep repeating the same arguments that don´t hold up if you look at the numbers that we do have. Not one of the people posting these arguments seem to have read even the last 3 comments. They skim the first paragraph and post the first thought in their mind. I am going to have to start a new thread and maybe move to a different forum with a less shoot from the hip impulsive response. This thread has gone completely off the rails and there is nothing productive happening here.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 12:27:01 am by excitedbox »
 

Online thm_w

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #33 on: January 10, 2020, 12:50:10 am »
that 8gsps is on 4 channels which you cant use all of at 70mhz. to use the full bandwidth and sampling you need all the upgrades which brings the price to over 4k. That scope is an outlier and when it came out I was surprised. Rigol was celebrated for releasing that scope for such an affordable price. Rigol is not as bad as the other companies when it comes to their base models because they are hackable. But the upgrades are still over priced.

You could also say Hantek makes affordable scopes so this isn`t needed. These are all excuses. Companies like Hantek have given us a good product at an affordable price which is why they don´t have the budget to develop their own chips. I for one would have no problem investing a couple hundred knowing that it will allow them to continue doing so at an even better price to performance. Think of it this way If 2000 people each paid $250, (Before people misinterpret that again. NO I don´t expect 2k people to do that) any budget manufacturer could give you 8gsps scopes for $900 like Rigol can but with all features unlocked from the start. Not having to pay another $3500 for all the upgrades. Last year that $900 MSO cost $4500 fully unlocked. That is the price difference that is possible. Also keep in mind that hacking the scope is piracy and is illegal because that is a software license they are selling you.

Sorry but I don't care what the upgrade costs, its not relevant to me.
Publishing a binary patch is not piracy and has not been shown to be illegal, as far as I know.

I disagree that any budget manufacturer can give you a 4-ch 450MHz 8GSPS scope for $900 without losing their shirts.
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Offline unitedatoms

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #34 on: January 10, 2020, 01:34:41 am »
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.  :)

From years ago what I remember about advertised breakthroughs in oscilloscope ASICs is two things: One brand advertised 50000/sec screen updates, may be meaning the good coverage of triggered sweeps ratio to missed events. Another manufacturer claimed trade mark of "Digital phosphor". That made me think that actual challenge in scope ASIC is dual-or-multiport memory with digital adders and faders per "pixel" (bin of Y magnitude). Say for Megasample wide X window you actually need full vertical Y column of "pixels" with all accumulated counts and fading. Perhaps 500x16 bit values. Before any optimization and compression that means 1GByte of multiport SRAM. That is core of ASIC. The rest are small things like interpolators, non-linearity correction by lookup, addressing routes/pipes to feed the SRAM, adders, faders, output interface to present SRAM to external CPU bus.

The multiport SRAM can be turned into external normal DRAM may be, say put large amount of DRAM chips on individual buses for parallelism, as much as pincount allows.
Then ASIC becomes a deserialising data sorter, updater to external DRAM, plus some DMA from the point of view of CPU.

I am just theoritizing about what "universal" can there in such pure ASIC for reusability as pure digital chip. May be such chip or major part of such chip already exists in form of say obscure telecom "Bla ATM arbiter, backbone router, massive crossinterconnect Cisco Bla thing"

Edit:
@excitedbox. I think there is nothing negative in this thread. The idea alone is very novel and disruptive. Speaking of shooting from hip. Which is also good. Internet is fast place.

Edit2: By "novel and disruptive" I mean idea of creating ASIC market for scopes. Not other related ideas of conquering existing established markets. Entering the established market is bad idea. Creating your own new market is good idea. That was some advise I heard from one successful tech in business.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 02:01:00 am by unitedatoms »
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Offline ebclr

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #35 on: January 10, 2020, 02:30:05 am »
"(AMD pays less than $13 for a CPU made on the MOST expensive node while this will be one of the cheapest. A qty discount can only go so far since there are still set costs such as materials and EUV is very slow)"

Once upon a time, somebody charges a customer 250 USD dollars to fix a device with only a 0.01C broke resistor, The customer complains, the resistor is only 0.01 C and you are charging me 250 USD?  The technician said, no resistor is only 0.01C I'm charging you 249,99USD, for my years of study and experience to know with one is the resistor who is broken

Regarding the dream to make the SOC, will not happen with 1 Million dollars you can buy 1111 Rigols, I  doubt you will find 2000 interested in pay  this amount for a chip, It's a dream, Will be easier to bring this million-dollar to Rigol and make a proposal for a open-source firmware version of the product, where  all the hardware is open-sourced, at a 30% discount for the ones on kickstart, with the soc they already paid, Still a dream but a more viable one
 
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Online wraper

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #36 on: January 10, 2020, 02:37:41 am »
2. Manufacturing costs are tiny in comparison. (AMD pays less than $13 for a CPU made on the MOST expensive node while this will be one of the cheapest. A qty discount can only go so far since there are still set costs such as materials and EUV is very slow)
Do you really believe that? If that was true, they would sit on piles of money instead of going towards bankrupt before releasing Ryzen. Such price is valid only for their outdated low end CPUs on old node.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 02:41:05 am by wraper »
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #37 on: January 10, 2020, 03:29:04 am »

Edit:
@excitedbox. I think there is nothing negative in this thread. The idea alone is very novel and disruptive. Speaking of shooting from hip. Which is also good. Internet is fast place.

Thanks for the reply you brought up some good points. The hard part with an Oscilloscope is getting the data into memory after that it becomes a lot easier. All these open source scopes would be a lot better if they had access to an asic like this. The Analog Discovery 2 for instance is a cool device but sadly they are limited in speed by their capture speed. A project like that with a faster signal capture would be very disruptive to the market.

The negativity I refer to is the stuff below that I am answering for the 8th time now. The one guy brings up a $900 and in his next post claims no manufacturer could afford to sell a scope for that price.


Sorry but I don't care what the upgrade costs, its not relevant to me.
Publishing a binary patch is not piracy and has not been shown to be illegal, as far as I know.

I disagree that any budget manufacturer can give you a 4-ch 450MHz 8GSPS scope for $900 without losing their shirts.

It is illegal because that binary patch is circumventing the DRM to enable software that you do not have a license to use. This is what the whole right to repair fight in the US is about. There is a guy sitting in jail right now for giving away free copies of windows that could be downloaded from the microsoft website WITHOUT a license key for people to use with their OWN license. If you download a free trial of photoshop and crack the license key it is clearly illegal. That is exactly what you are doing when you hack your scope. I don´t care about that though.

Rigol already sells the MSO5000 for that price, YOU brought that up. The hardware cost to them is no different whether you upgrade it or not. The parts are in the device when you buy it for 900 and then you buy an upgrade code for each feature that you want on top of that. They have reduced the price slightly recently for some of the upgrades but this scope is very attractive to the hobby market who is unlikely to upgrade and will sooner hack the license. And again the price will come down using an ASIC.



Regarding the dream to make the SOC, will not happen with 1 Million dollars you can buy 1111 Rigols, I  doubt you will find 2000 interested in pay  this amount for a chip, It's a dream, Will be easier to bring this million-dollar to Rigol and make a proposal for a open-source firmware version of the product, where  all the hardware is open-sourced, at a 30% discount for the ones on kickstart, with the soc they already paid, Still a dream but a more viable one


Again I already said that getting 2000 people to donate $200 is not the plan (I even clarified that in a note just for you) it was a hypothetical. Please read the thread before posting irrelevant stuff that everyone that does read has to waste their time on. The big cost for designing a Keysight ASIC compared to this is also that they build from the ground up instead of using IP blocks. Using IP blocks is like using chips but smaller. You don´t design every op amp circuit either you buy an op amp and call it a day. There are IP blocks for fast ADCs and everything else needed available. There is a software suit called Magick that is open source for designing chips.


2. Manufacturing costs are tiny in comparison. (AMD pays less than $13 for a CPU made on the MOST expensive node while this will be one of the cheapest. A qty discount can only go so far since there are still set costs such as materials and EUV is very slow)
Do you really believe that? If that was true, they would sit on piles of money instead of going towards bankrupt before releasing Ryzen. Such price is valid only for their outdated low end CPUs on old node.

No, those prices are for their 12nm node which are much more expensive and these asics would be made on much older nodes anyway due to the higher voltages and cost savings. At the smallest 45nm but I am assuming either 65nm or even larger. That would have to be determined.

Again though please don´t make statements without informing yourself first. A quick google would have saved me that answer. AMD was no going bankrupt because of the costs of manufacturing chips. Up until 2012 Intel was paying Dell up to $1.2 billion a year not to use AMD chips. Along with every other OEM. AMD tried gifting HP 1 million CPUs FOR FREE and they refused to take them because Intel would punish them by cutting off their bribes. In addition Intel who is a major supplier of compilers kneecaped AMD CPUs by having their compilers use slower instruction sets if you had an AMD CPU this made peple think AMD CPUs were worse than Intel.

Here is a video that will explain the anti consumer BS Intel has done since 1982.
 

Online tautech

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #38 on: January 10, 2020, 03:34:33 am »

.......................

If we make a chip for up to 1Ghz and 4-5Gsps using interleaving on 1 channel that would bring the cost of the scopes used by over 50% of the market down to something affordable.

................
Happening already:
https://siglentna.com/product/sds5104x-1-ghz-4-ch/

I don't see 7k as affordable. Although it is great to see prices coming down.
As others have attempted to point out, this 1 GHz 5 GSa/s HW is the same as used in 350 MHz models for some $ 3570 and the same promo including all 7 options for free is effectively a $2k further saving.

Do the sums, 1 GHz, 5 GSa's HW and options for what amounts to $ 1570  :o


Quote
That just proves the points I have been making though. 1 siglent is a budget brand. 2 they were selling all those upgrades for over 2k before even though you already had the hardware.
:-//
Do you imply other brands don't/won't do promotions ?

Quote
3. Why can Feelelec give you a signal generator where the HW + Software costs 1/5th as much as their software upgrade. Why can the DreamLabs sell you a logic analyzer for $80 with the HW and Software and they charge several hundred for just the software upgrade.
Just one word; support !

Quote
The Rigol 4000 or 5000 I forget which one, costs $900 for the base model but over $4000 with all upgrades. That means it contains under $500 worth of parts. Is it really justified to charge almost 1000% for the software that has no repeat cost associated with it?
All brands are guilty of this. Period.

If the true cost of options was factored into pricing all equipment would be somewhat dearer and we wouldn't have the pricing structures we have today. For some time manufacturers have been cramming additional capability into equipment that few of us will ever use let alone want however such is the capability of modern gear now this results in less equipment on the bench albeit also for less cost.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 03:42:14 am by tautech »
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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #39 on: January 10, 2020, 03:41:50 am »
That is why we need industry support. Hantek, MCH, Siglent, Picoscope, Voltcraft. Developing their own Asic might be out of the range of each of them individually but if they each only have to put up 5-10% they might be willing to invest. They would be the ones benefiting the most from it in the end and in the grand scheme of things is 50k no that much to invest in the future of their business. You have to remember that all their competitors now have their own chips so they are falling behind.
Can you really see marketplace competitors in some alliance developing an ASIC that they each will use ?

I have my doubts but good luck.  :)
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Offline ogden

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #40 on: January 10, 2020, 04:44:29 am »
The negativity I refer to is the stuff below that I am answering for the 8th time now. The one guy brings up a $900 and in his next post claims no manufacturer could afford to sell a scope for that price.

They can't sell "fully unlocked" scope for price of BW-limited one! With same success you can ask all software companies to sell their full products for price of "lite" version. Your argument is not even naiive. It is absurd.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 04:49:04 am by ogden »
 

Online David Hess

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #41 on: January 10, 2020, 05:26:00 am »
You can accomplish everything you suggest with a reference design using existing parts including a bit of programmable logic and no custom ASICs.  Nobody has even done that so I doubt the economics make either viable and an ASIC based solution even less so.  Full documentation to an existing DSO with the proper hardware would allow it but that is sure never going to happen.

From years ago what I remember about advertised breakthroughs in oscilloscope ASICs is two things: One brand advertised 50000/sec screen updates, may be meaning the good coverage of triggered sweeps ratio to missed events. Another manufacturer claimed trade mark of "Digital phosphor". That made me think that actual challenge in scope ASIC is dual-or-multiport memory with digital adders and faders per "pixel" (bin of Y magnitude). Say for Megasample wide X window you actually need full vertical Y column of "pixels" with all accumulated counts and fading. Perhaps 500x16 bit values. Before any optimization and compression that means 1GByte of multiport SRAM. That is core of ASIC. The rest are small things like interpolators, non-linearity correction by lookup, addressing routes/pipes to feed the SRAM, adders, faders, output interface to present SRAM to external CPU bus.

The multiport SRAM can be turned into external normal DRAM may be, say put large amount of DRAM chips on individual buses for parallelism, as much as pincount allows.
Then ASIC becomes a deserialising data sorter, updater to external DRAM, plus some DMA from the point of view of CPU.

I am just theoritizing about what "universal" can there in such pure ASIC for reusability as pure digital chip. May be such chip or major part of such chip already exists in form of say obscure telecom "Bla ATM arbiter, backbone router, massive crossinterconnect Cisco Bla thing"

The ASIC or programmable logic generates a 2D histogram in real or decimated time.  Performance is limited by memory bandwidth so embedded memory which can be wide and shallow has an advantage over external memory.  High performance desktop CPUs have enough cache bandwidth and instruction parallelism to take advantage of it to perform this operation.

Some compromises in performance would allow a commonly available CPU for embedded use to produce a reasonable display assuming that the digitized data could be delivered to it.
 
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Online wraper

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #42 on: January 10, 2020, 07:38:56 am »
2. Manufacturing costs are tiny in comparison. (AMD pays less than $13 for a CPU made on the MOST expensive node while this will be one of the cheapest. A qty discount can only go so far since there are still set costs such as materials and EUV is very slow)
Do you really believe that? If that was true, they would sit on piles of money instead of going towards bankrupt before releasing Ryzen. Such price is valid only for their outdated low end CPUs on old node.

No, those prices are for their 12nm node which are much more expensive and these asics would be made on much older nodes anyway due to the higher voltages and cost savings. At the smallest 45nm but I am assuming either 65nm or even larger. That would have to be determined.
Please don't make such bolt statements without providing anything supporting it, showing source of this data. Googling does not show up anything supporting this claim.
Quote
Up until 2012 Intel was paying Dell up to $1.2 billion a year not to use AMD chips.
As if it was enough to cause this. And I knew about it even without you. Also I knew that Intel paid compensation to AMD.
Quote
AMD tried gifting HP 1 million CPUs FOR FREE
Now it's simply BS.
EDIT: BTW HP made AMD based desktop PCs and laptops before 2012 when judgement was made and before 2009 as well. have seen plenty of them.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2020, 10:09:33 am by wraper »
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #43 on: January 11, 2020, 12:07:26 am »
You can not say what can or can not be afforded without knowing how much this chip costs. We know right now the ADCs etc are expensive. We know FPGA development takes a lot of time, making it expensive. We know Open Source projects reduce costs in 95% of cases. Paying 5-10 engineers 50-60k a year to develop memory controllers on an FPGA is money you can save if you have a chip that has a memory controller on it.


David Hess- Keysight, Tektronix, Rigol, all have their own ASICs. Did you even read the first post? You picked single pieces of information to base your argument on and didn´t look at the whole picture.

You say there wouldn`t be competition but when anyone can buy the same chip, if you don´t compete someone else makes the same product and your share is reduced. Also there are many ways to skin a cat. I might want to save a few bucks and buy a scope with USB 3.0 while someone else wants a larger LCD and another person wants even faster data transfer to chain instruments. Most of the things that add value to a scope are beyond the signal capture. Signal capture is only the first step. Even in the UI there are enough differences that 10 people want 10 different devices. Some people love USB scopes while others would never buy one.

Someone mentioned a ~$1300 scope with 350MHz. Hantek has a $600-700 scope with 300MHz. The thing is anything beyond that you are spending as much as a car. You are basing your arguments on hypothetical specs for a chip that has not a single feature locked in. No one including myself knows yet what this would look like.

Arguing that it is pointless is ridiculous since 6 companies each spending 1 mill plus and hoarding a chip for themselves is done for a reason. BECAUSE IT IS WORTH IT. They make so much money they don´t need to sell it to split the costs.

The argument of not being able to recover the costs is missing the point. They are buying several chips right now which cost enough to cover development of those chips, company profits for those chips, marketing costs for those chips. These costs are still there. When McDonalds sells you a Happy Meal that Toy is not free. YOu pay for the toy in the price of the happy meal. Same with buying 1 chip instead of 5-6-7-8. Buying 1 chip is cheaper because of efficiencies or NO COMPANY WOULD EVER make their own chip. It would never be worth it to combine chips into one custom chip.






Yes Intel paid less than 3 Billion compensation for 20 years of pushing them out of the market. They didn´t just pay Dell they paid ALL OEMs Toshiba, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, All of them took bribes. These companies sell/sold around 80% of the worlds PCs. AMD was forced to settle in 2007 or 08 when the recession started and they would have gone bankrupt if they hadn´t. Fact is AMD was almost locked out of the market from 1984-2012 while producing a very expensive product and that is where the money problems came from and not because the profit margins were not there. Someone did the math recently and their entire Server chip production comes from a few like 2k wafers a year. Now look at how much profit the server market brings them. That profit is coming from around 100k CPUs.

Quick google

Search: "AMD 7nm wafer cost"
AMD cost per wafer, yields, and cost per good die for 7nm, 12nm, 14nm
https://adoredtv.com/zen2-chiplet-quality-examined-by-cost/

Here are similar prices for Apples wafer and die costs.
https://wccftech.com/apple-5nm-3nm-cost-transistors/

Search: "300mm wafer cost"
Wafer Profits for Pure Play $7.41 per sq inch at .5 micron on a 200mm wafer $53.86 per sq in at <20nm on 300mm. So same square inch produces 8x the profit because of higher costs.
https://www.elektroniknet.de/markt-technik/halbleiter/wafer-preise-unter-druck-158732.html
« Last Edit: January 11, 2020, 12:13:01 am by excitedbox »
 

Online tautech

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #44 on: January 11, 2020, 12:37:56 am »

Someone mentioned a ~$1300 scope with 350MHz. Hantek has a $600-700 scope with 300MHz. The thing is anything beyond that you are spending as much as a car.
Nope, you missed the point.
So does Siglent in the 2ch SDS2000X-E series, for $ 620 you can have the 200 MHz version that can be hacked to 350 MHz....done it so proven.

SDS5000X 4 channel models of 350 MHz are the same HW as 1 GHz @ 5 GSa/s and using two 5 GSa/s ADC's.
The point being SDS5034X @ ~$3.5k with current promo of $2k of free options is effectively just $1500 if you wanted all of them.

Current marketing and technology is giving us deals like never seen before which leaves little fat on the bone or desire to push to higher levels of performance such is the small amount of sales in that sector.
Avid Rabid Hobbyist.
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Online nctnico

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #45 on: January 11, 2020, 12:39:37 am »
You can not say what can or can not be afforded without knowing how much this chip costs. We know right now the ADCs etc are expensive. We know FPGA development takes a lot of time, making it expensive. We know Open Source projects reduce costs in 95% of cases. Paying 5-10 engineers 50-60k a year to develop memory controllers on an FPGA is money you can save if you have a chip that has a memory controller on it.
ASICs are even more expensive to design compared to FPGA. Actually many digital ASIC designs are prototyped/debugged using FPGAs.

Either way the hardware cost of an open source oscilloscope is largely irrelevant. There is lots of existing hardware for sale anyway. When push comes to shove it is perfectly feasible to take an existing piece of hardware (for example a low cost Hantek) and create new firmware for it. However even when including the FPGA development the balance between hardware & software effort to create a digital oscilloscope is 1 to 50. Writing good oscilloscope firmware is a massive task which is where open source oscilloscope projects fail. It takes probably 3 complete rewrites before getting the fundamental structure right. If there is any chance on a succesful project then start with the software while using an existing platform (red pitaya, analog discovery, etc). Once the software is done the hardware is peanuts.
« Last Edit: January 11, 2020, 12:44:45 am by nctnico »
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 
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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #46 on: January 11, 2020, 03:12:03 am »
That is a good point about the software that is why I want to include a "scope OS" with this project or at least a framework. Just like there is Openwrt, RouterOS, Asterix etc. We do have the sigrok firmware but right now no manufacturer wants to use that. The reason development is so expensive is because the signaling hardware is so different in each scope. You can´t just attach a SOC and send some triggering commands to a chip or set the attenuation or gain.

There is also the problem of light speed. Hantek CAN'T give us more without ASICs the distance that the electrons travel in that time becomes to short. So even if someone wanted to capture signals faster it just isn´t possible. This applies to other products besides scopes as well. If there is a simple to use signal capturing chip, a ton of other opportunities open up.

In addition a FPGA is really complex internally which makes them expensive. A chip has tons of transistors and resistors but a FPGA needs all the same stuff PLUS the routing and switching transistors. There is a ton of complexity that can get removed.

If you look at the links I posted below a custom ASIC starts to look very attractive with a development savings of 40-60% and a BOM savings of 50%. Their calculation is if you spend 250k a year on parts you can recover the investment in 1 year using multi Layer Reticals.

We all know that when working with Arduino, using a motor library etc speeds things up tremendously. So if we can offer a library to interface with this chip it will drive costs down much more.

I have already gotten interest from 3 other projects that say yes, it would make things easier and I am looking to contact more in the coming week to see what would be interesting for them.


Claims a 40-60% development cost savings in addition to noise reduction and other benefits.
https://www.sigenics.com/blog/7-asic-integration-benefits

Custom Silicon Solutions claims 125-250k NRE expenses for a custom mixed signal asic and 50% savings on components.
http://blog.customsiliconsolutions.com/uncategorized/custom-asic-development-cost-considerations


Tantech-
Again the argument that because there are $2000 350mhz options we don´t need $1000 options for 1GHz is stupid. Also you are assuming that companies don´t want to save money. And you are making that assumption before even knowing what savings are possible. The hypothetical specs I mentioned ARE NOT SET IN STONE as I have mentioned before but you keep ignoring. You would rather push breaking the law. If you don´t like it don´t participate, If one of these chips gets developed you don´t have to use it or buy a product using it.

It is stupid not to innovate just because YOU are happy hacking your oscilloscope. There are plenty of arguments to make against this but none of yours are valid.


If someone had asked does anyone need a DDS chip like the AD9850 you would have said no way, you can already build that yourself. But a ton of signal generators use it. Or even better the BA5937AFP which is a 4 Channel driver chip used in DVD drives. It is just a couple OpAmps but for some reason every DVD and CD drive uses those chips instead of putting 7 OpAmps in their drive.
 

Offline unitedatoms

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #47 on: January 11, 2020, 03:22:18 am »
I'd hate to work in R&D with bosses who think that R&D has a predictable cost. Say someone walks into the room and says, $250k to start and finish this design. Go!

Idiocy! That is the breed of MBAs we (technocrates) allowed to grow and start speaking and even have an attitude. They have a language with words like "SME" Subject Matter Expert, because they themselves have no clue about a subject, only about accounting. This SME word must freaking die in history. "SME"s should ever work for bosses who are technical or scientific themselves. Not for those who have no back history of doing the homework and sweating on the Subject Matter.
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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #48 on: January 11, 2020, 04:06:35 am »
Did you read the last post and that is it or did you need me to explain it more clearly? Nobody assumed any cost was set in stone in addition to most talk having been of costs 4 times as high. I was stating that with their reported costs for the development coming to $250k dollars and that 250k being a 50% savings would conclude that if you spend $500k in parts you would recover your money in 1 year. It was an attempt to make it easy for people to understand since. People essentially keep saying you can´t make money by paying less for parts.


Id hate to work with people who every time you say "We could do this, or we could do that", that it is an absolute. I say we need to see what is needed but a chip with 4gsps would offer these possibilities and their answer is 4gs exists, 4 gs is not possible, Rigol does 4gs, nobody can do 4gs and not go broke. Nobody needs 4 gs.

Do you see how that is not productive? Maybe that is the difference between management and a worker. The worker has been told what to do so long he can only think in terms of definites and not maybes.

You have to explore and discuss what is possible, what makes sense, what are the trade offs, what are the numbers.

People keep making assumptions and when I show examples of their assumptions being wrong they again assume that those examples now apply to this.

I just wish that the idiots would learn to keep it to themselves. If they disagree good. Don´t waste my time with it though.
 

Offline unitedatoms

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #49 on: January 11, 2020, 04:16:02 am »
When last time Europeans (nations occupying Europe geographically) made an Asic with more than 100 transistors ? Simple question.

Edit: I mean NEW asic design
« Last Edit: January 11, 2020, 04:20:09 am by unitedatoms »
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