I'm really interested in seeing how this thing is used in the real world. That's the sort of esoteric knowledge one can't readily find on google.

Dave if someone told you 5 years ago that Agilent would be sending you such expensive equipment to take apart you would have thought they were mad!

Cool ! Yes, please make a vid with that LED and how this would be used. That will help many viewers to understand datasheets better.

do it do it DO IT DO IT ... would love to see an LED and a 3904 characterized!

Whilst the electronics enthusiast in me appreciates the layout simplicity, the designer part of me is drooling at the "mechanical" part of this machine. That fan cooling design, the latch in boards, the slide cover...pure technological machine porn.

Thanks for making your videos - have you on the background as I’m tackling tedious circuit stuff. You make it more entertaining to do the work without distracting me - and sometimes I learn something! Or just get to appreciate cool stuff. Thanks man.

The quality on the macros is amazing! Nice video!

That's why I love watching and listening to you Dave in your videos, You are clearly very knowledgeable in the world of Electronics but some of your phrases kills me. When you were talking about the TI OPA 1611 opamp (30:32) and saying you could 'Fart half way across the solar system and generate less distortion' while LMAO funny, pretty much tells you without any compromise the spec of that poor sucker. By the way, you must be doing something right for HP (They are still HP in my book, we mainly used HP at GEC in the 80s) to loan you not 1 but 2, $13K test units.... (Just wiping the drool off my chin there).. Thumbs up for everything Dave.... Oh by the way, the other video you made which featured Sagan opening your 'Mail on Monday' you revealed he was 3?... that meant he wasn't even a glint in the proverbial eye when you started your uploads.....boy has he got some catching up to do...... I hope he takes up Electronics, he has a good start after all with you there. laters.....

The expression on his face is insane during the "take it apart" part. love your Tuesdays.

Hey Dave, Can you ask Agilent how much out of cal your tear down caused. That would be quite interesting.

Beautiful piece of tech. right there. Thanks for the teardown!

I really would like to see a real world scenario and a good review of this thing :)

Kudos to Agilent for letting us see inside this.

Woooo! Teardown tuesday, my favorite :D And an what an awesome device of choice!

Measure the input impedance + leakage of one SMU with the other SMU!

Who knew a new SMU! Very COoL. Did not know about the TriaX BNC's.... Youch 😲 But loved it. Thank you Ausi Man! ❤

great teardown thanks

beautiful board. Thank you !

Great video Dave, those green (Q1) caps are Mica HV caps, I use them myself, very expensive stuff :-)

Seeing that much hardware in a machine that modern means it's something special.

Yes! we want the separate video!!

Great video!

+1 for the 2nd video!

Yes please Dave, do as much with you can as these before you have to send them back!

10 femtoamps? You can fly to the moon on 10 femtoamps!

I too would love to see you using this device to demonstrate the characteristics of semiconductor devices - and maybe fuel cells and solar cells and batteries too. Thanks for an interesting look inside this SMU.

Nice piece of equipment. +1 for second video, and 08:56 - 10 x 10^5 = 1 Mega ohm.

+1 for a video showing us how it works. Would love to see you profile some common components, perhaps a zener and a chepo transistor?

Very nice video! I'd love to see them in action

At 15 femtoamps, there are about 93000 electrons passing through in a second. That's really quite impressive.

I was taking a drink when he mentioned that "...fart half way across the solar system and generate more distortion than this..." OH MY ! ! ! Watching the video had to take a back seat to cleaning my keyboard and monitor. I wish Dave would take the time to print a warning regarding his comments PRIOR to starting the tear down. I'll just consider myself forewarned and be more careful in the future. GREAT JOB ! ! !

great job laying out this sucker! :O

NI also makes PXI versions of SMUs. But Dave got it right with the other 3 vendors.

I tore down a 2.1kW Flextronics server power supply recently, which looked to be every bit as well built as this piece of Agilent test gear...and extremely compact for something which is rated for over 200 amps at 12VDC.

Позновательно!

I'd love to see the application video! :-)

Oh yes, please make a separate video how to use that bit of gear :)

very nice video.

2:00 Agilent sure turned into one of your premium business partners

I'd love to see how you use one of these things to characterize components. Say a complimentary pair of PNP/NPN transistors (PNP is harder to get good performance out of than NPN, can we see the difference?), a LED or even better a laser diode (how do they differ), and a MOSFET (maybe again a complimentary pair)? Given limited time, what would be most interesting?

Very nice

37:52 TIL small E96 series resistors use a 3-digit alphanumeric code that you need a table to decipher. Never would have guessed that 25X = 17R8. Wonder what those little resistors are doing there.

very nice

And easily repairable too!

Awesome, thanks for sharing! I noticed that on the TOP layer of the PCBs (30:58) there are only signal traces and no GND plane. What is the thought behind this? wouldn't extra ground copper help with crosstalk suppression, etc? I've noticed this on other high-end PCBs. Thanks

Would love to see how you use one of these

Check out the poorly soldered connection on the rightmost lead of the 10M ceramic resistor at 25:52

Another problem with putting vias in pads like that is that the solder balls that you get on the opposite side prevents a tight fit with the solder paste stencil causing to much paste being applied and in turn causing solder bridges. This of course only applies to double sided mount boards.

Way late to the game here, but one of the other main advantages and purposes of the triax probing system is that you can have your circuit that is being tested to be at a significantly different base (ground) reference than the test gear. E.g. the circuit under test can have its ground potential floating at several hundred volts different than the Agilent B2912 and yet be able to still allow for femto-amp current measurements between hi and lo, since their chassis grounds are independent. Just had to add that tidbit of info.

Thanks Agilent and thanks Dave. Any chance of getting an interview with one of the designers of this or similar equipment? Maybe on TAH?

I'd like to see a demo of how to use it, interesting piece of gear you don't see every day

Hey Dave , Nice video. Could you make a video about testing this equipment ?

I would love to see you characterize ENOBs on a 24-bit ADC with this.

You mentioned the triax cables, and how shielded they are, and how expensive they are, but not that they're made out of special low triboelectric materials? And how if you're doing low current measurements, you must wait after moving the cables to get accurate measurements? In my experience, even tapping the desk that the cables are sitting on can be seen in low current measurements in the fA range. Pretty touchy stuff - literally!

Yes please do a characterization of a Transistor or a mosfet :)

13:11 I never even thought of software-upgradability of these devices.. is it common for manufacturers to sell aftermarket software upgrades that involve replacing the processing hardware board? Very interesting, nonetheless

I don't believe that particular part number of reed relay is made anymore since Sanyu Electric was purchased, but looking at TPM Sanyu's offerings, that looks very much like one of their wet reed relays with high voltage (1kV) switching capability and insulation resistance to 10^14 ohms.

Triax is used extensively in the video industry.

Thx Agilent and Dave! Please ask Agilent how much tear town changed the instrument.

When you say "dual" I hear "jewel" :)

Ooof solder joint on the 10M Res @ 25:58

At 23:20 I see two traces that seem to just wander off the board to the left. Are those for panel testing? Before the board was cut out of a larger carrier panel?

We have 3 of them in the lab.

haven't had a giveaway in a while, just one of them, I'm sure Agilent wouldn't mind,

Nice video Dave. Just a quick question, was there oxide on the backup battery? Sure looked that way on the video. And, yes, please do a video of the usage of an SMUUUUuuuuuu aka Sex on a stick ;-)

Will You do review on this ?

I'm sad you never made any follow up videos?

The triax is used to eliminate leakage current more so than noise. Typical coax is 100MOhm between conductor and shield, so even with just 1V, leakage current is 1nA, making any attempt to measure below this useless.

Looks like Windows CE judging from the button controls @ 58:00

What about measuring uCurrent on this device?

Can someone explain to me what is the purpose of the 2 parallel 0 Ohm resistors at time-stamp 37:00? They are right above the tantalum cap at the top left part of the screen.

cool

Incredible. They claim it has 10 fA of resolution and they don't even put coaxial/triaxial connectors... If you need that kind of resolution coaxial cables are a must. Then the buyers have to buy another 200$ adapter in order to have them.

It looks like they used a generic pci express psu connector where the outputs plug into the board, interesting.. Dave you should tear apart a Corsair AX 1200i, little 1200 watt PSU, supposedly its the best one on the market right now, 98-99 percent efficient, only problem is they keep dying on people, no one knows why, maybe you can solve the mystery.

Hi Dave, please schematic? Would appreciate if give more details about the circuit related to the current and voltage sensing for this Source measure. As this is super accurate, the special in it is the input voltage & current sensing.

I figure they reason they have to re-caliberate it is that when taking it apart you have to break the seal that guarantees the calibration to be correct and for them to be able to replace the seal they have to be absolutely certain that its 100% up to the right calibration specs, even though they know you won't go messing with everything, they just have to know for absolute certainty that nothing accidentally changed. The people that use anything that is calibrated like that place complete trust in it. I'd just take their insistence on re-caliberating it as evidence that they just take the trust their customers put in them very seriously and set high standards on just being sure.

Can somebody let us know what type of glue is used to hold the yellow bodge wire in place? I am suspecting it is some kind of a silicone. I work on bringing up prototype boards and having such a glue would be very handy to hold down bodges, which I need to make lots of...

>sex on a stick... classic Dave XD

Aw, shucks... I'll take two!

start making the second video already :)

YES SHOW US HOW IT WORKS rofl

Pixies. Chocolate. John Howard's eyebrow clippers...?

please be nice to these instruments...i believe they'll return the favor

Did you inhale helium at 57:33

35:00 do i see a bodge?

Still want to see a PNA teardown....

you can fly to the moon on 15fA !!

Just detected a tiny bit of distortion. Yep, someone just farted half way across the solar system!

did you encountered module failed?

Dave Jones have you changed your camera?

Wouldn't they make more money by lowering the price to a more reasonable/ affordable $800-1000 and then sell just sell a bunch and push volume like stores such as walmart do with food (sell for less but push such a high volume that you make more money at the end of the day)?

Where can I buy that t-shirt?? T_T

This thing costs more than my car!

Can you imagine what they are using today? OMG... the specs would make me sick.

is it my imagination or is U614 stacked ICs?

Was I the only one who spotted a mouse cursor as it was booting?

9:11 105=10 00 000 =1Mom

Do I hear 10k do I hear 8k 8k what bout 10 10 10k do I hear 12K, 10 K 10K how' bout 13k.. Sold at 12k lol.

but does it run Crysis?

Second.