Author Topic: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.  (Read 19171 times)

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Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« on: January 09, 2020, 05:59:28 am »
We keep seeing open source oscilloscope projects for several reasons. One reason is features that the big players are not providing such as good firmware. Lets face it though these open source projects are no better.

The big reason in my opinion is price though. Scopes and test equipment cost insane amounts of money. Which is why these open source scopes will never compete with the main players. In the last few years Rigol, Tektronix, Keysight, and Agilent have all spun their own Asics. In an article last year Keysight claimed that it brings the cost down to a point where they use the same chip in a $450 scope as their $45k scope.

Why is there no purpose built Oscilloscope SOC on the market? It seems like such a no brainer that since we all need scopes that that is one of the chips that is desperately needed. Over the last few years the cost of producing a custom chip design have come down dramatically. I have done some looking and it is much cheaper than what is wasted on these multi million dollar kickstarters that produce the Solar dehumidifier or graphene super heater that breaks physics. The NRE for a custom ASIC would be about 500k-1 million (I have seen much cheaper but lets be realistic  :-DD) but that is quickly recovered because the production cost would go down so dramatically after. If everyone that has bought one of the $700 Open Scopes or $650 RedPapaya etc. put even 1/3 of that money into kickstarter they could have a scope that performs on the level of a multi thousand dollar scope for the same price.

I propose a 2 prong solution. A fabless company/foundation to produce the chip and sell it in addition to offering the design at a very low licensing fee and a base design for free such as what arm does with their IP. The collected licensing fees can then be used to fund development of firmware development. The free design would allow anyone to benefit from it not just big companies with huge wallets.

The chip should be modular in design so it can be cut down for entry level, mid level designs. It should be adaptable for use in multiple test instruments to allow MSO, MDO, DSO all to use the same SOC. This way instruments no longer need to use expensive fpga chips which are only suited to the task because of their adaptability. It will cut down a lot of the development cost for the firmware as well, while also allowing anyone to modify or extend the firmware.

The dominant players in the industry have been selling us hardware and then charging us again to use it, with crazy expensive license fees for faster bandwidth or a signal generator, etc. that is already in the scope. Why should a $1k scope cost over $4k if you want all the features unlocked. They have been nickle and dimeing us worse than Apple.

They are holding back innovation by keeping the test equipment out of the reach of students, researchers, small companies, and individuals. We need to put a stop to it.


I think the first step would be to Form and Register a foundation or company to make something official. Then look for people with experience who would be willing to donate some time or work with the promise of getting paid at a later date. Then a more solid plan than my ramblings needs to be formulated which can be presented to companies who may invest into this endeavor so they can use the chip once complete. Once we generate some interest we can hammer down the specs for the design. During that time the rest of the team can develop a web presence and generate more interest around the project. When we get to a place where we are confident we can raise the money and have a design that fits enough peoples needs we can move to the funding stage. During that stage the design should be finished so that once the goal is reached we can do a first tape out.


Obviously this plan needs work and I have nowhere near the experience to lead a project like this but I would be happy to donate my time and skills in any way possible. At the very least I can make a website and make marketing materials in German and English. If it gets to a point where we meet with manufacturers I would also be able to meet with German manufacturers to push the project.

I have made a discord server for anyone interested in helping move this along. OScopeAsic is the server name.  https://discord.gg/DVmNC3
« Last Edit: January 09, 2020, 08:48:21 pm by excitedbox »
 

Offline ali_asadzadeh

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2020, 06:16:06 am »
That's a good plan, If you manage to find some donation that could cover 50% of my prices, I have expertise in the VHDL and PCB design,and I can help and can donate the other 50% myself. ;)
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Online ataradov

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2020, 06:35:41 am »
"500k-1 million" is not realistic, it is way-way optimistic. It would be somewhat realistic for a run of the mill digital IC, like a very simple MCU. It is nowhere close to analog ASIC.

And if you are starting from a complete scratch, then this sum will just cover tools and libraries.
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Offline daqq

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #3 on: January 09, 2020, 07:06:52 am »
While a noble cause, I'm thinking that you are severely underestimating the cost of developing a usable IC (according to your specification it is a one-size-fits-all-and-everything) and overestimating the demand for a product with such an IC.

To the best of my knowledge, the whole semiconductor industry is a patent minefield, everyone suing everyone enthusiastically.

Quote
If everyone that has bought one of the $700 Open Scopes or $650 RedPapaya etc. put even 1/3 of that money into kickstarter they could have a scope that performs on the level of a multi thousand dollar scope for the same price.
A third of 700 USD is 230 USD. That's not a lot of money to build anything for that's not built in REALLY massive volumes.
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Offline aheid

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #4 on: January 09, 2020, 07:55:35 am »
"Why is there no purpose built Oscilloscope SOC on the market? "

Maybe that's a hint. More often than not there's a reason for a gap in the market, and it ain't a missed opportunity.
 
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Offline OwO

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #5 on: January 09, 2020, 08:16:59 am »
Don't jump to conclusions that just because it doesn't exist, that it doesn't make sense economically.
VNAs are a good example of untapped market potential existing for years, and it was a low hanging fruit; it didn't take much effort to beat existing players on price/performance. It still baffles me how no one saw the opportunity for all these years and only now was something like the NanoVNA introduced. Maybe it's due to the high barrier of entry to electronics entrepreneurship in most countries, and it had to take chinese cloners taking it on.

However, I agree that developing an ASIC as described will take far more than just the mask costs, and to do it in plain daylight means patent lawsuits. I think there is still room to beat existing players WITHOUT a custom ASIC, and this path is more worthwhile of investigation. You will not get anywhere near a good idea of parts costs from looking at digikey, so the starting point must be a market survey of the key components (ADC & FPGA) and "inside knowledge" of the pricing of these things in volume from the manufacturers, as well as discovering all such manufacturers. High speed ADCs for cheap probably do exist, see this thread: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/reverse-engineering-fnirsi-5012h/
FPGAs also can be very cheap in volume.
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Offline DaJMasta

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #6 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.


But the problem is cost.  As others have mentioned, just fabbing the chip is a gigantic cost... but finding those with enough expertise to design it with a relatively high success rate (and not many very costly respins) is going to be expensive in itself.  You can't expect that caliber of design team to be donating their time... and most of the people with the experience needed to put something like that together in somewhat short order already work for the major players making their own proprietary ASICs for doing just that.


If you're talking about <1GS/s sample rates, maybe you can get some basic SoC for the ADC, basic triggering, and memory management.... but if you're expecting versions of the chip to be able to handle 1GHz+ front end bandwidths or high resolution (10b or 12b conversion).... I think it's a lot more difficult of a challenge than you give it credit for.

As a point of order, I'd also disagree with the assertion that the big test equipment managers can't provide good firmware.  Yeah, a lot of it can stand to have some more polishing... but I think it's come a long way in usability and gets a lot more issues addressed in the last 10-15 years.  Most of the major manufacturers don't offer entirely bug free firmware, but offer scopes that are very usable and very powerful that have a couple orders of magnitude more complexity than early digital scopes and their firmware.



Now if someone wrote the software for an FPGA that connected a standard ADC interface, a standardized trigger system (or just implemented basic entirely digital triggering), and regular DDR memory of some flavor - that could be a core element that could be used in a lot of designs and be iterated on meaningfully in an open source environment.... but it's not going to be nearly as flexible or modular as what you're thinking, I think, and then there's still the matter of building up the whole UI and application software to interface with it.
 
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Offline filssavi

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #7 on: January 09, 2020, 09:07:43 am »
The main misconception here is about why big players put ASICs in theirs scopes. At the top end (think keysight UXR or lecroy labmaster with 100 GHz of BW) it is ceratinly because no off the shelf solution does exist with the required level of performance, however if we look at the mid/low end (where a kickstarter effort mightjust manage to be competitive) with up to maybe 2/4 GHz BW and 10/12 bits ADC's  this is most definitly not the reason.
In that space you can build a solution entirely out of standard components from regular manufacturers (AD, TI, etc). The ASICs are only used because they are cheaper in large volumes (tens to hundreds of thousands of units), and keep also in mind that by going down this route you commit to a single architecture until you have recouped the costs and made enough profits for the next generation, and you risk ending up with something like the megazoom 4 and the low end keysights, that while they were once competitive and all, now are hopelessly outdated (in the low end maket anyway).

Now even if you manage to raise the capital on kickstarter (let's say 5-15 milions might be just enough) and assemble a team (which will be if we are generous 1/2 senior engineers  with 5-10 years of experience poached from industry and the rest newly graduated students) you still face a 2-5 years development cycle (2 for a half backed product and 5 for a fully polished one) which is way too long for kickstarter, and the uncertainty of how much it will sell later (you still have to convice engineers to back you) if you want this to become something long term viable

Even if you manage to execute all the above perfectly and all the stars align, what will really kill you is that you will not have any serious probes to use your product with, as all the interesting stuff (active differential, current, high voltage differential, etc) with decent performance is only available by scope manufacturers and compatible with their scopes only
 

Offline OwO

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #8 on: January 09, 2020, 09:23:38 am »
Above 2Gsps forget it. One channel of desktop DDR3 connected to a Kintex 7 can probably manage 2GB/s reliably (and 4GB/s peak), but any more and you won't be able to do it within reasonable cost with off the shelf parts. Triggering is not very hard and doesn't take much FPGA resources to implement.
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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #9 on: January 09, 2020, 09:47:40 am »
Above 2Gsps forget it. One channel of desktop DDR3 connected to a Kintex 7 can probably manage 2GB/s reliably (and 4GB/s peak), but any more and you won't be able to do it within reasonable cost with off the shelf parts. Triggering is not very hard and doesn't take much FPGA resources to implement.
But thats the inherent beauty of an FPGA, need more throughput to memory? Use a wider bus. Also using the characteristics of the incoming stream allows you to simplify and/or produce hard realtime performance in the controller rather than relying on a general purpose random access policy.
 
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Offline filssavi

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #10 on: January 09, 2020, 09:59:59 am »
Above 2Gsps forget it. One channel of desktop DDR3 connected to a Kintex 7 can probably manage 2GB/s reliably (and 4GB/s peak), but any more and you won't be able to do it within reasonable cost with off the shelf parts. Triggering is not very hard and doesn't take much FPGA resources to implement.

The Zynq Ultrascale (MPSoCs) the PS alone (hardware memory controller) support up to DDR4-2400 for a theoretical maximum bandwidth of ~20GB/s, you could also implement an additional DDR controller in the PL and get even higher bandwidth,

From trenz you can even get an off the shelf module with 4GB of DDR4 and a almost 300k LUTs for considerably under 1000 € in 1k quantity, and I'm shure that with higher volumes and dealing directly with Xilinx would get you a good deal on the IC's themselves
 

Offline OwO

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #11 on: January 09, 2020, 10:05:12 am »
So the OP is targeting a retail price around $200 which means a total BOM cost under $80. Zynq-7010 is probably the best you are going to get if you want to leave enough room for the ADCs and front end. At this price I say 1Gsps is realistic and you may undercut Rigol, just maybe with no display.
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Offline filssavi

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #12 on: January 09, 2020, 10:56:22 am »
I had completely missed the targeted price-point  |O |O

In that case I completely agree with you, and also the use of an ASIC is even more unlikely, unless he intends to ship milions of the thing
 

Offline ogden

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #13 on: January 09, 2020, 01:12:24 pm »
So the OP is targeting a retail price around $200 which means a total BOM cost under $80. Zynq-7010 is probably the best you are going to get if you want to leave enough room for the ADCs and front end. At this price I say 1Gsps is realistic and you may undercut Rigol, just maybe with no display.
Right. Result will be "scope" in form of bare PCB with no enclosure, no screen, and .... no firmware/software. This is just one of those daydreaming projects "let's make XYZ because BOM of PCB cost virtually nothing" :)
 
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Offline OwO

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #14 on: January 09, 2020, 04:02:45 pm »
You know, if someone manages to put out a 1Gsps scope for less than $50 it'll probably sell pretty well even with very rudimentary software. A waveform display, maybe a bit of zooming, some basic triggers, etc. I could write the software and firmware in two weeks. But getting the ADCs and Zynq for that cheap is a bit of a stretch. Might be possible with chinese ADCs, I'll look into it.
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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #15 on: January 09, 2020, 04:11:12 pm »
The big reason in my opinion is price though. Scopes and test equipment cost insane amounts of money.

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.

 
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Offline unitedatoms

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #16 on: January 09, 2020, 04:36:48 pm »
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.
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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #17 on: January 09, 2020, 05:09:26 pm »
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).

 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #18 on: January 09, 2020, 06:26:14 pm »
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.

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Offline Lukas

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #19 on: January 09, 2020, 07:34:15 pm »
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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Online KE5FX

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #20 on: January 09, 2020, 07:49:46 pm »
Yep, the RFSoC really does sound like the right way to go.   Analog Devices seems pretty upset about them, for some reason.   :popcorn:
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #21 on: January 09, 2020, 08:06:28 pm »
Please read thoroughly before posting it seems a lot of replies are based on misconceptions of what these asics do and what it is I am suggesting.

In Short. ASIC IS THE FRONT END. ADC, DSP, Memory Controller, Clock, Triggering, All those things. Then whoever wants to use it buys an ARM soc with Arm cores, LCD driver, Uart, IO, all those things you need for the displaying of the signals etc. for a few $ from ST and connects it to the memory.


Also keep in mind that I am not proposing designing or producing a single scope. 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.

How much they sell the product for in the end is still up to them in the end. Any speculation of what is achievable price wise is just speculation and WAY to early to say what is or isn`t feasible beyond Keysight using the same chip in a $450 and using 4 of them in their $45k scope. If each company right now can afford to make their own ASIC and hoard it for themselves the economies are there even for low production. Then multiple companies using the same chip must be worth it even if it just gives them cheap access to the IP to produce the chips they need.

A 300mm wafer produces hundreds of CPUs and even 7nm costs 8k per wafer. Yes they make higher numbers but 7nm is also WAY more expensive than 130nm or 350nm.

This is not a problem of can it bring results it is a problem of can we get it financed. This levels the playing field because it removes the large upfront nonrecoverable expense and spreads it across multiple companies over time.


I think people misunderstood me on the price example. I meant if they all pooled that 1/3 of the cost of those projects and put it towards investing in the development of an asic you would have raised enough money for the development of the chip. Then the other 400-500 would have paid for a much better scope using that chip.

Nobody is gonna use our chip for a 100GHz scope. Be realistic. This doesn´t have to be an all or nothing thing. Just as there are budget CPUs and Server chips.

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. These scopes right now are in the 40-50k range because of software licenses. If you use 4 chips you can have 4 channels with 4Gsps or you can use 1 chip and have 1Gsps.

A chip like that would bring a 1GHz 2 ch scope down a ton in price.

You would not want to put the processor in the asic. The asic would contain the analog front end and signal processing and memory interface. Everything beyond that can be handled by off the shelf ARM SOCs for pennies. Most of the features that make a scope desirable such as UI, LCD, USB interface, Ethernet, Wifi, Displaying a waveform or inputting values for a waveform to output, that can be done using a few ARM cores. The only part that needs to be on the asic is the Front-end because of the speed at which signals need to be captured, processed and stored. 

What makes it expensive right now is that there are only few analog FPGAs and those that do have some analog functions only have slow ADCs because they are not specialized for the test equipment market. That means you need a fast ADC and an FPGA to process the signal

Also keep in mind the concept of SOCs has only really taken off in the last few years. Before that parts count in electronics was much higher because the development cost was higher. The technology, ecosystems and way of doing things just hasn´t been around that long to say this is a missed opportunity because as we see the companies that are at the tip of the spear are now starting to implement this. I am sure that in a few years some company with more of a application focused product portfolio will make such a thing.

Piecing together IP from many companies has become much simpler and there are now basic building blocks that are combined just like we build a circuit on a PCB but smaller. Combining a DSP core, DDR3 controller, ADC, DAC and attenuation. etc. onto a single chip is much easier and the Open Core Project, and a few others make it possible for anyone to build a chip.

Keep in mind that Keysight and the crew design the chip from the ground up because they want to go for huge bandwidth and maximum savings an so on. We can use IP cores because we wouldn't need 100GHz signal capture. Nobody is gonna use our chip for a million dollar Oscilloscope.

If Feelelec can make a signal generator and sell it for under $100 why is it a $1200 upgrade for a 25Mhz gen on a Rigol scope? Obviously the cost is just an arbitrary number and if you can bring the parts cost down and provide an open source framework of tools each company can customize their UI and features to their hearts content and drop prices to a reasonable level.

There are millions of scopes sold world wide and it would be more if they were more affordable. Don´t kid yourself and believe that because of small production runs they can´t afford to make them cheaper. If this was the case they wouldn`t give you the Hardware for a $4000 scope for $999 and charge the rest in upgrade fees.


If the chip has a modular design meaning you can slice off a channel on the ADC etc. it should be possible to make a scope for 250 or 300 or 500 or 1000 by putting in a whole chip or half chip or multiple chips. Just like AMD has done with their chiplet architecture. The 3970x sits on the same module as the 3990x they just solder on 4 chiplets less.

Anyone that is interested in working on this send me a PM and lets see if we can at least do a market analysis to see if it is possible. I assume everyone has discord maybe we can move the discussion there. I made a discord server. OScopeAsic is the server name.  https://discord.gg/DVmNC3

My dad is a retired chip engineer (Zeng Labs, Original AMD Radeon GPU, Iphone 3 to 4 A processors at Apple, and SOCs at LG) and although he wont want to work on this full time he would be a valuable asset for any questions that might arise.



Silicon Wizard, I know there are budget scopes in that price range. I have a Hantek 5000 series myself. Those scopes could be even better if they used a custom asic. Right now they are buying ADCs that cost about as much as an ASIC would. The budget scopes are great and I would never have been able to afford a scope if it wasn`t for them but as soon as you go past what they offer you are stuck buying a scope that costs as much as a car.



My post has gotten long enough. I ask people to please read thoroughly before posting and informing themselves of what these chips do. Half my post is just correcting misconceptions. It doesn´t help you or the project to get off topic discussing things that are irrelevant.
 

Offline excitedboxTopic starter

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #22 on: January 09, 2020, 08:17:01 pm »
By the way the Oscilloscope market is about to reach $1.7 Billion in the next few years. So don`t tell me that the market size is to small and the numbers are not there. That is probably close to 1 million scopes per year being shipped by about 70 companies.

https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/oscilloscope-market-size-to-cross-1720-million-by-2024-2019-11-01
 

Offline daqq

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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #23 on: January 09, 2020, 08:53:30 pm »
Quote
ASIC IS THE FRONT END. ADC, DSP, Memory Controller, Clock, Triggering, All those things.
My guess: there's no way you'd fill the budget for a competitive IC that could handle all of that, that includes:
- paying a team that is able to pull it off for a reasonable time frame
- NRE for prototypes and initial batch
- development and validation
- IP (you either license a load of IP or develop everything from scratch, ADC included in such a way that it does not step on any patents)
- tools
from kickstarter, given that the repayment is pretty much a thank you and the possibility of cheaper scopes in the distant future. The kinds of cash you'd need is in the serious venture capitalist area. Good luck and all, but I'm skeptical.
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I assume everyone has discord maybe we can move the discussion there. I made a discord server.
Why? Aside from the fact that not everyone has discord, the forum is a much better platform for this sort of discussion.
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Online tautech

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  • Taupaki Technologies Ltd. Siglent Distributor NZ.
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Re: Oscilloscope ASIC Kickstarter instead of Open scope.
« Reply #24 on: January 09, 2020, 09:13:05 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/

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These scopes right now are in the 40-50k range because of software licenses.
Rubbish, may a few are but the marketplace is rapidly changing.  :popcorn:
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