There is not much reference to these cards on this forum, so I though it might be interesting for you to see what’s inside.
In its day it was pretty advanced scope card, it has 2 channels, it has a 8 bit 1GS/s sampler on each channel (supports interleaving), mine has 2M sample memory, but there was 16M sample version as well. The card came to market in the early 2000's.
The card takes up one full size PCI slot, it is a dual plane design: digital interfacing and analog circuits are on a separate board.
The digital board is not very interesting (for me at least) it employs ALTERA MAX and FLEX CPLDs and an AMCC PCI matchmaker chip plus a FIFO memory.
The magic obviously happens on the analog board then. There is a nice big DC-DC converter: Gaia Tethys is rated at 30W, it has 5V and 2.8V output. Obviously the AD converters are under the fan cooled heatsink. The circuit layout of the input attenuators are interesting with the 45° angled ICs.
So what is under the heatsink?
Atmel TS8388B 8bit 1Gs/s ADC one for each channel. Interfacing to the heatsink happens through a thick sheet of thermal material, it is similar to plasticine covered by losely woven textile on both sides.
Atmel TS81102G0 8/10bit demultiplexer one for each channel.
Close up on the input attenuator area. A two level attenuator is employed one for 50 Ohm and an other one for 1MOhm. It is built around AD8001, AD8009 current feedback opamps CIIG and COTO RF relays, a MAX4005 is used as a FET buffer.
Close up on the supplementary circuit and trigger input. Interestingly the analog board uses CPLDs from Xilinx.
Software hacking:
As I see the company have/had strange marketing strategy. When new, this card cost ~7800€, and came with a software called GaGeScope LITE, now this LITE edition is so feature limited, that you basically can’t do anything other than setting the sampling rate/time base and input attenuator settings, no math, averaging, cursor or automated measurements, the biggest thing it can do is to export the acquired signal in ASCII format, to put it simply: hardly usable. And the funniest is that you still need a product key for even this!
The Professional version of the very same software which enables all the functions, supports 29 built in measurements, advanced math function, multiple displays of the same channel etc. is very usable, but costs another 1000€, yikes!
When installing the GaGeScope LITE edition (at least the one was supplied with my card) the installer asked if I’d like to try the Professional version for a limited time (that is: 50 program starts or 21 days). Sure I tried it, which assured me that the software in fact capable of every feature, only it is locked down in LITE mode. So I turned my focus how is the usage is tracked of the time limited Professional mode. It was not too difficult to find a registry key (by comparing registry backups before and after software start) and found the usage is simply stored in a DWORD where the first half corresponds to the number of program starts left, and the other half is the number of days left, simply „adjusting” this number to maximum yield 32768 program starts and 65535 days of usage avalilable for the trial period. As I’ve found there is no other safety measure for this matter, even if the counter once reaches zero ( eg. after 179 years LOL) it can be reset without penalty.
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