Author Topic: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end  (Read 23726 times)

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Offline coppice

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #25 on: December 09, 2015, 02:33:52 am »
Moder scopes use pipeline ADC, which is essentially cascaded flash ADC+DAC pairs.
There are various pipelined configurations. Some take one bit at a time, and look a lot like an SAR converter where the stages are spatial rather than temporal. Its quite common to be like the first pipelined converter I used in the late 1970s, where each stage deals with 2 bits. These are often drawn in data sheets like they are a 2 bit ADC, a 2 bit DAC and an analogue subtracter at each stage. However, the ones I've seen the detailed internals of actually use a single analogue block that outputs 2 digital bits and passes on the analogue residual without any clearly distinguishable DAC.

Don't trust the block diagrams in modern data sheets too much. They conceptualise a lot of what is going on to illuminate functionality, rather than implementation details. For example, most ADCs showing a PGA at the input don't actually have an amp there at all. Its all done my smoke and mirrors... or sometimes by switching capacitors or current feed resistors.
 

Offline Neganur

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #26 on: December 09, 2015, 12:13:25 pm »
I can find material on the web which says R&S use converters of their own designs, and I found some performance information about them. I couldn't find any info on the type of converter, though. Do you have any? Its quite possible some people still use flash converters, but its not the mainstream technique these days. Its not the technique the TI, ADI and Hittite (yes I know that is also ADI now) converters in most low end scopes use.

People in forums keep saying that scopes use flash ADCs, but its mostly because they have never bothered to look and see what is really in a scope. Its hard to make a flash converter run fast. It takes too much power, and the die is too big. Unless you need the extremely low latency a flash converter offers it just makes no sense. Pipelined converters run faster, are more accurate, and take far less power.

Sure:

HMO722/HMO724 http://cdn1.shop.rohde-schwarz.com/media/catalog/product/H/A/HAMEG_DB_EN_HMO722_724_1.pdf
HMO1522/HMO1524 http://cdn1.shop.rohde-schwarz.com/media/catalog/product/H/A/HAMEG_DB_EN_HMO1522_1524_1.pdf
HMO2022/HMO2024 http://cdn1.shop.rohde-schwarz.com/media/catalog/product/H/A/HAMEG_HMO2022_2024_5.pdf
HMO3000-series http://cdn1.shop.rohde-schwarz.com/media/catalog/product/H/A/HAMEG_HMO3000_EN_1_1.pdf

All of those Hameg's have a low-noise flash ADC.

RTM, RTE and RTO only mention "single core ADC". Whatever that is :)
HMO1002/HMO1212/HMO1222/HMO 1232 don't mention the ADC type.


« Last Edit: December 09, 2015, 12:15:07 pm by Neganur »
 

Online pascal_swedenTopic starter

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #27 on: December 09, 2015, 04:02:55 pm »
The Owon looks really nice on the video, however I have just a remark.

The horizontal buttons under the screen, really seem a bit low positioned, almost down to the bottom ground level of the scope.

Why didn't they place them in the middle between the bottom of the screen and the bottom of the scope? This really seems a design issue that needs to be flagged to Owon!
« Last Edit: December 09, 2015, 05:23:22 pm by pascal_sweden »
 

Online pascal_swedenTopic starter

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #28 on: December 23, 2015, 12:54:55 am »
When will Dave do a review about the Owon XDS3202A?

The specifications for this scope are quite impressive: 200MHz , 2GS/s, 12 bits ADC, 40M, 75,000 wfms/s

http://www.owon.com.hk/products_info.asp?ParentID=57&SortID=87&ProID=182

First a review about the performance. After a tear down.
But not only a tear down, as I really want to know how this scope performs :)
« Last Edit: December 23, 2015, 12:56:41 am by pascal_sweden »
 

Offline Muxr

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #29 on: December 23, 2015, 04:20:12 am »
Interesting scope if the 12bit mode can be paired with a usable FFT. Could be quite handy for audio work.
 

Offline Mark_O

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #30 on: December 24, 2015, 09:21:10 pm »
The horizontal buttons under the screen, really seem a bit low positioned...  This really seems a design issue that needs to be flagged to Owon!

Golly, you're right!  You should contact them immediately!

a)  I guess they never noticed where they had placed the buttons.  This will come as quite a shock to them.

b)  I'm sure they will stop production, redesign the scope immediately, and re-release it properly.

 ;D
 

Offline Lukas

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #31 on: December 25, 2015, 09:59:43 pm »
RTM, RTE and RTO only mention "single core ADC". Whatever that is :)
It's not interleaved, so no interleaving distortion. R&S rolled their own ADC: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6226133 It's a folding/interpolation architecture.
 

Online pascal_swedenTopic starter

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Re: Chinese oscilloscopes with 12 bit AD converter in the analog front-end
« Reply #32 on: April 15, 2016, 09:12:36 pm »
When are the others (Rigol, Siglent) following Owon's example? :)
 


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