EEVblog #384 - Agilent 4000X Oscilloscope Teardown

What's inside Agilent's new 4000 X-Series Touch Screen Infiniivision oscilloscope?
Teardown Tuesday
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[taranablitt]

The connector at 2:45 will be for the 50/60Hz mains line trigger via by the opto-isolator at 20:45. Mike shows this in his teardown of his 6000 series scope (v=5lYbD9_eIko at 6:05).

[vcfvr]

I think I have an explanation for the unpopulated BGA chip, based on my wandering in the firmware : it's a FPGA tagged "usb retriever", used to support High-Speed USB decode.
So the chip has to be standard in the 1.0GHz and 1, 5Ghz versions, and not present in the lower bandwidth versions.
Btw, the low/full-speed USB decoding seems not to use this dedicated FPGA : only the main FPGA is used.

[sbreheny]

Since the scope can accept voltages over a huge range (100s of volts down to millivolts), you need some circuitry to convert that range to the narrow range (often +/- 2V or so) for the A to D converter chips. An analog front end is a collection of attenuators, switches (relays or MUXes), and amplifiers which accomplish this task.

[tracyscott]

Very interesting to see. A bit out of my price range but still fun. Thank you.

[deelkar]

The fan is not only cooling the PSU but the A/D converters and processors

[ickipoo]

As noted in the video, standby consumption is about 2W.

[ickipoo]

Maybe they're proud of their work - inside as well as out? They may also be proud of the fact their device can be safely disassembled to be repaired if necessary (at $20k+, you'd sort of hope so).

[SwitchingPower]

The chip near the front panel USB connectors is a Renesas uPD720114 4-port USB 2.0 hub.

Also the the touchscreen is connected using USB, so probably all USB connectors and the touchscreen go trough the hub.

[spodule]

AD633 is 4 quadrant precision multiplier.

[BalticLab]

If they already use a 10 MHz reference internally, why in the world do they not offer an input for an external 10 MHz reference input? That's a feature I have been missing in oscilloscopes for a while. Most of test gear has 10 MHz reference inputs, just the oscilloscopes don't.

[FooBar]

correction: the 350Mhz model can be upgraded to 500Mhz in software, so seems like they share the same font-end

[DLTX]

I guess there was an embargo on it before today ... right Dave?

[rainbowsalads]

Hi Dave, if you could take apart any electronic device in the world, what would it be?

[jobicek]

I believe that unpopulated BGA between the ADCs is populated in the 6000X series which also uses MegaZoom IV and should be the same form factor as the 4000X series. The 6000X series has better sampling rate (20G vs. 5G per channel pair) but lower update rate (450k max. (135k default) vs. 1M). Interestingly, the front end is always >6 GHz capable, all bandwidth upgrades should be licence key only.

[antoniopetito]

yay the video speed-up whistle is back..

[Shawn_White]

so when you first started doing the blog did you ever think you'd be tearing down an agilent 4000 series.

[AntiProtonBoy]

So what's the damage for one of these puppies?

[hydrolisk]

Taking apart something new that you just bought, EPIC, I do the same :) All the time.

[TS]

What is the black and white space-age microscope looking thing in the right at the start of the video?

[TheSurvivalSecrets]

Can I have it? I have no scope :). I'm to electronics and learning a hell of a lot from Dave. The circuitry on this scope is A.) mind blowing and B.) extremely interesting!!! Thanks Dave.