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Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an engineer's darling since their introduction around 2008. A lightweight, small, 8-bit oscilloscope with up to 1gHz bandwidth, full MSO capability, protocol decode and a waveform generator - what more could you want? Despite the incredibly successful launch of the 2000a and 3000a, some ugly problems developed over time that crippled the oscilloscope range. One of those is NAND memory corruption. This article details the complete recovery procedure and offers insight into the source of the problem.
FPGAs excel at parallelizing data streams and in this case, handles the less critical external measurements, waveform search & navigation features, and math functions relegated from the MegaZoom IV ASIC. Thus, if the DUT (Device Under Test) has a short of some kind near the area of probing, and the host oscilloscope is not powered, there's a good chance you've just damaged the Maxim MAX9201 comparators in the logic analyzer section of your scope! Also, major thanks to Dave Jones for not pulling down the 2000a/3000a nand recovery thread on eevblog and to Daniel Bogdanoff who is the right kind of crazy in serving as a Keysight liaison for antsy engineers with broken scopes.
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