Products > Test Equipment
Where is the Keysight Megazoom V ASIC?
<< < (7/39) > >>
wraper:

--- Quote from: 2N3055 on February 11, 2022, 11:03:44 pm ---
--- Quote from: wraper on February 11, 2022, 09:29:01 pm ---
--- Quote from: 2N3055 on February 11, 2022, 09:57:05 am ---If you keep analog front end from 3000T/4000, get rid of aMegazoom IV, put a  single 16GS/s (a variant of?) converter from EXR (which would still get you 4GS/s in full channel mode, instead of 2,5GS/s now) and pipe that into Zynq, you would get immensely more powerful platform than now, and 10bit too.... You would literally solve all of the shortcomings of current platform. Pretty much what Rigol is doing, but with better performing components.

--- End quote ---
Somehow I didn't notice a better performance overall. Performance of Zinq based scopes fall flat beyond certain performance friendly settings and do not actually reach the performance of Megazoom to begin with. Megazoom based scopes perform well regardless. If Zinq is so perfect, why Rigol rolled out their own custom ASICs for their Ultravision II scopes (with Zinq also included)?

--- End quote ---

Like I said, "Keysight is fast!" is a U/I responsiveness thing. It is something that "button twiddlers" (people that turn buttons real fast to benchmark how fast scope will respond) notice immediately but rest of people not so much.
It is a credit to how well software in Keysight scopes is written.

--- End quote ---
I did not write about UI responsiveness at all.
2N3055:

--- Quote from: wraper on February 12, 2022, 07:19:57 am ---
--- Quote from: 2N3055 on February 11, 2022, 11:03:44 pm ---
--- Quote from: wraper on February 11, 2022, 09:29:01 pm ---
--- Quote from: 2N3055 on February 11, 2022, 09:57:05 am ---If you keep analog front end from 3000T/4000, get rid of aMegazoom IV, put a  single 16GS/s (a variant of?) converter from EXR (which would still get you 4GS/s in full channel mode, instead of 2,5GS/s now) and pipe that into Zynq, you would get immensely more powerful platform than now, and 10bit too.... You would literally solve all of the shortcomings of current platform. Pretty much what Rigol is doing, but with better performing components.

--- End quote ---
Somehow I didn't notice a better performance overall. Performance of Zinq based scopes fall flat beyond certain performance friendly settings and do not actually reach the performance of Megazoom to begin with. Megazoom based scopes perform well regardless. If Zinq is so perfect, why Rigol rolled out their own custom ASICs for their Ultravision II scopes (with Zinq also included)?

--- End quote ---

Like I said, "Keysight is fast!" is a U/I responsiveness thing. It is something that "button twiddlers" (people that turn buttons real fast to benchmark how fast scope will respond) notice immediately but rest of people not so much.
It is a credit to how well software in Keysight scopes is written.

--- End quote ---
I did not write about UI responsiveness at all.

--- End quote ---

OK, fair enough, please explain what do you mean by : "Performance of Zinq based scopes fall flat beyond certain performance friendly settings and do not actually reach the performance of Megazoom to begin with."

Waveforms per second? Is that what you think by it?
robert.rozee:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on February 12, 2022, 01:15:15 am ---[...] Whether it's ASIC or FGPA or some some hydrib or whatever doesn't matter [...]

--- End quote ---

i'm surprised no one has mentioned risk yet. releasing a product containing a new ASIC carries a high risk, as any design defect within that ASIC can most likely not be fixed in the field. for this reason, there is an incentive to make use of an (old) ASIC that has been well tested in previous products. if you must use a new ASIC design, you at least have to put it through an extreme level of testing to ensure it is 'defect free'. this testing is... expensive.

an FPGA firmware defect, however, is much less severe from the commercial perspective. indeed, if you can identify any defect early on, and quickly produce a customer-installed firmware update, then suddenly your customers will lauder you as hero for backing up your product with ongoing support and development. without necessarily extending the service life of a product, a manufacture may garner customer 'brownie points' by (1) being able to release the product earlier, then (2) providing one or more updates (just bug fixes) that the customer perceives as 'free extras'.


cheers,
rob   :-)
nctnico:
Risk in an ASIC can be mitigated by creating programmable (statemachine) blocks. I think this is already the case for the existing Megazoom ASICs.

In the end the choice for an ASIC depends on cost reduction per product, engineering costs and the ability to add extra features. AFAIK the ADC is also included in the Megazoom ASICs so there is a significant cost saving for having 1 chip where the competition needs to buy 3 seperate chips (ADC, FPGA and memory) and 'glue' these together.
Fungus:
Occam's razor says "Cash cow".

Most likely they're still selling as many 'scopes as they can make so they haven't bothered yet.

They probably have a new ASIC in the pipeline ready to go if a serious competitor ever comes along.

There may also be a bit of Fluke factor where managers/purchasers want the same old 'scope they've known for years. They don't want a radical new design or a mixture of old/new devices in the building.


--- Quote from: nctnico on February 12, 2022, 12:53:37 pm ---Risk in an ASIC can be mitigated by creating programmable (statemachine) blocks.

--- End quote ---

They've had plenty of time to test it.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod