EEVblog  

4K version still rendering BTW

I’ve been waiting days for the Mailbag video and then my own video shows up! 😂

When you see that "HLi" logo, that is HiSilicon, Huawei's fabless subsidiary that makes all their custom ASIC.

Getting an accurate price for something like this will be difficult, i cant speak for the video market but as a system engineer for telecommunications when you buy something like this the hardware itself is only part of the price and generally only 40-60% of the cost. Throw this on the secondhand market and it would be worth about its weight in recyclable material thats it. Much like Cisco equipment the real money is in the total service contract, ie ongoing support, turn around time on replacement hardware in the event of failure and software updates etc. It's been years since i've dealt with Huawei personally but they were really aggressive on pricing compared to Cisco, Juniper etc. With an MSRP of 175k behind closed doors in a large company you would expect a quote for around half of that, so lets say 90k and of that i'd estimate the hardware itself would have only been about 50-60k with the remainder for a 3 year negotiable contract - it starts to get merky when you start talking negotiations though. What i found most interesting with the Huawei gear that i came in contact with is the CLI was in Chinese, ie all the characters were the typical chinese looking ones - we couldnt even make basic changes using it and had to rely on a Huawei employee to get the initial configuration set to then be able to use the web tools and external software to control things.. thankfully the project went in another direction :)

That 24:20 mystery logo is the Huawei HiSilicon semiconductor company. They do ARM, Mali, and IC designs

We do up to 6 streams of video+audio transcoding on an Intel Atom processor, with 5 Atoms per blade, up to 4 transcoding blades per system, for a max of 120 simultaneous transcoded streams. The blades go into a 16-slot backplane that uses naked 1Gbps SERDES (SGMII) to provide 52 fully switched ports for stream routing. We can pull down all the transponders from multiple TV satellites and dump any selected combination into multiple output formats, including HLS/DASH, QAM, DVB-T/T2, NTSC, ATSC, ISDB-T and more. And I'm one of the Systems Engineers. Yeah, it's fun!

That weird metal pin around 6:00 is just for alignment during assembly/maintenance. See the taper on the pin? It's so you don't need to 'aim' the module and hope that the connectors will line up; the metal spike aligns it for you!

The two metal spikes are only for mechanical alignment before the connector fingers mate / get damaged.

20:30 "Tight as a nun's nasty" LOL

wow! the power supply is made by my dad's company. they provide a large amount of power stuff to Huawei. I've just asked. the boom cost is under 100 dollars! Thousands of this model are still produced every month.

I don't understand a word of it... but I watch every minute of it.☺

WOW Dave, your enthusiasm has exhausted me, wish I had just 10% of it, interesting tear down.

There aren’t 9 audio processors! There are 8! The center one is different, has no RAM attached to it, it looks like.

Similar units i've worked with sell for 30K or more, back in 2013 they'd probably be 70K+ USD. It's probably useless mostly today. These units are highly modular, and they'll reuse the same modules to scale them to the larger units to process more video calls. This kind of device enables a video conference, so it has to deal with processing and transcoding the video streams from the video conference devices. So you can have all your locations in your business in a single call and talk to each other. Assuming this came from emergency services, it was probably used for training and meetings between the locations for police/fire/EMS or something like that.

On the audio processing board, the IC in the middle does not have memory next to it. So you do have 8 audio channels and an extra IC.

Send the power supply to DIODEGONEWILD. That is the guy with the cute cat and European accent. He does some great reverse engineering schematics of power supplies.

Thank you for the great content Dave!!! Your great guides for engineering interviews helped me a lot getting a job as an electronics engineer.

Now that's quite a different kind of "made in china", Dave

These connectors are called power blade, are from the company Amphenol ICC, are very good and support multiple connections to high current, not that you disconnect with the current flowing.

I even keep the screws and hardware when I tear down stuff like this. Good quality hardware is expensive and very useful!

Second hand pricing via google from a reasonable source puts the price at ~USD$122,000

An MCU is used to connect multiple video conferencing calls together. So there would have been a bunch of meeting rooms each with a video conferencing device in there and if they all wanted to meet, they would dial into this MCU. The MCU mixes the audio and video streams, and then sends a stitched together image of the far ends to each video device. You can either have lots of small meetings or one large one, this device supported up to 24 1080p calls. These kinds of video conferencing devices and MCUs are mainly sold to big enterprises and they are not cheap. The room devices can be between $25k - $299k list and the MCU something like $8k a port. This sounds ridiculous, but remember that these are enterprise devices, one of the main selling points is they cut down travel, so it doesn’t take many transatlantic flights saved before you have paid for the devices in time and fares.

Huawei technologies definitively blows my mind.

That data connector on the backplane is used to connect boards together in the larger chassis version. There will be some backplane interconnect, which is not needed in single board version. That is also why there are so beefy spikes, they're used as guides when you slide these boards to the chassis.

"That's not a knife! That's a knife!" - Do every Australian have such a knife like Crocodile Dundee?

Well that was an interesting 37 minute teardown of a Huawai, box of chips and shit. I still don’t know what it’s supposed to do but the MSRP is $175,000

The little 8 pin DIP on the backplane could be an EEPROM that stores inventory data, likely so that the backplane serial number, part number, revision etc can be identified within the OS running on the box. Quite common in telecomm'sy equipment. May be DIP if there are no surface mount components so they could avoid a reflow process for that board. Edit: spoke too quickly. 😋 Looks like a press fit socket, so no soldering at all on that board.

sure, it might not be built down to a price, but you'll certainly get a deep discount depending how valuable your company's trade secrets are.

There must be 500 bucks in tantalum's alone in the BOM lol That thing is awesome,..

Huawei are one of the largest players in the VDSL DSLAM market which have their SFP modules on a 45 degree angle, protruding the front of the switch/router/modem.

@22:17 people might not think of Canada as a high-tech place (with all of us living in igloos and such) but keep in might that modern things like AMD Radeon video cards have their roots in Canada via the former ATI Technologies company. Great video! Love looking at enterprise/industrial design and what results when there are no bean-counters involved in the design process.

Probably mentioned 100 times Dave, that solid state drive was a good old Compact Flash card.

Interesting how a single device has Nanya, Samsung, Hynix and Micron RAM.

24:27 That would be Hisilicon, a fabless semiconductor company owned by Huawei who do their in-house processor designs (such as the Kirin series of SoCs in their smartphones)

what a beast!... the "audio" board had 8 channels...the centre one didnt have memory around it...so its differernt..probably a countroller/multiplexer

One good reason to use press-fit for those connectors is that a PCB as thick as that backplane wouldn't get very good fill on the plated through holes as it is passed through wave solder. And it's too thick for pin-in-paste reflow. So press-fit is your only option in that case.

16:16 the data connection on the power board is only there to hold the board in place, the processor PCB is the same as in the modules that can be swapped into the larger chassis' where you can have multiple processor boards for redundancy. This is just another classic case of the same PCB for different versions of a tiered product line. :)

These MCUs (I'm used to different brands, so take with grain of salt..) would basically be a switch for A/V conferences.. You would "dial" in via SIP or H.323 and each person connecting would get it's own point to point connection back to this box, which would do all the transcoding for different bitrates, and all the audio mixing and echo cancellation. You would create connection points (basically a URL) with a unique number, which defined how many resources that conference would allow, so you could give a secretary a 3-party conference, and reserve a 20-party conference for the bosses big conference room, etc.. I haven't done anything like this for about 15 years, which might put this device on par with my old outdated experience, but I think all this is done with DSP resources in routers these days... not really sure..

On the board with 9 chips, the center one is not like the others. Should pop that heatsink off and check underneath it.

Loved it. My first EE job was at Compaq 35 years ago, working on heat dissipation.

Nice! I never knew that dedicated video conference hardware was a thing. Until now, I assumed one always used servers for this, maybe with some GPUs for video transcoding.

20:37 "Tight as a nun's nasty." Love it!

Super cool to see a (relatively) modern device that isn't just a PC in a custom box. Some beautiful engineering in there.

The large pins on the backplane would be for alignment. Doesn't look like it has guide rails for the module, so vertical alignment could be off if some yahoo is trying to shove the module in and quickly destroy both the backplane but the module's connectors. Replacing a backplane is a pretty big pain in the butt since they are almost always the last component to come out. I had to do one on a server cluster because a blade with a defective connector that would either fold or break off a few of the backplane's connector pins. Worse yet was that the damaged backplane port would cause the same damage to good server blades and repeat the cycle. 3 blades and half the slots were foobared before the damage was noticed. The blades were salvageable due to the pressfit connectors and donor pin slices from a dead blade. The backplane connectors were monolithic pressfit with no sourcable replacements even if they could be pulled out. Luckily used good backplanes on ebay were pretty cheap.

What engineering, wow. Was there anything on the CF card?

When I worked for a major US defense contractor, we built equipt to the same standards as this. Same manufacturing techniques and standards. The prime reason for it to exist was to last far longer than the designed lifetime. Reliability was the primary concerned. I recognize many of the cable manufacturing standards, and those were from the mid- to late-80's.

Very similar to the approach of server blade and routing chassis from the same era. You're spot on with the comment that cost is no object. It's all about continuity of service delivery, hot swapability/live servicing, throughput and heat control in dense racked environments. What's even better is when you design the server rooms and racks for these things, you need to worry more about BTU output and airflow than anything else. You DON'T want hot spots or no-flow zones or you get real problems.

The audio board around 24:20 has 8 chips laid out the same but the center one has different components around it.

Those Altera FPGA's are not just "housekeeping" PLD's. Those are serious big boy FPGA's.

'Backbone for a video conferencing system for emergency purposes' Oh boy this is like the 007 touch slide table display stuff.

Used from a Canadian reseller they go for 12400 US dollars per single unit, so a rack of ten would be 124000 US Dollars plus mounting and rack hardware costs

Wonderful stuff! First class engineering meets first class enthusiasm - it doesn't get much better.

Hi Dave. The front SFP+ cages are angled at 45° to reduce the risk of someone accidentally looking into the business end of an optical transceiver when it's inserted into the SFP cage. Some optics can do a bit of damage.

Lots of good salvage parts here, power modules, good quality caps, top quality inductors, lots of top quality mosfets, a lifetime supply of low profile heatsinks, a home defence weapon (backplane)

Greetings: Considering the lack of dust (especially on the fans) I suspect this was a spare unit or an early failure.

Actually you WANT turbulent flow around heatsinks. It seems a bit paradoxical, but if you have smooth laminar flow, you end up creating a boundary layer that acts like an insulator. Turbulant flow generates vorticies that bring unheated air into contact with the heatsink. That is why the fins are serrated instad of solid.

Seeing Dave so happy with this just makes my day. Governments use these for area traffic Monitoring around where I live.

I've an old Juniper MX series (biga$$ internet router) DPC line card I've wanted to send in for a teardown, but it's really big and heavy. Basically think the board you've got without the chassis around it. They're about the same size, very somewhat similar idea. 4x10G (ethernet) ports on the front of it. A bunch of custom ASICs and some FPGAs, a switch fabric to the backplane (fabric switch cards are connected to the backplane). A PPC on the linecard for management, housekeeping, and bringing up the ASICS and FPGAs. That talks to the chassis management (called a routing engine) via a couple of ethernet ports (on the backplane) using TNP (after TFTP booting from the routing engine!!!!). Very distributed architecture in the Juniper MX. MX240/480/960 support far more than just ethernet, but, the other types of physical interfaces are going away. The line cards basically do all the routing right at the line card, the routing engine connects to the peers, digests a routing table, and sends it to the management PPCs on the line cards. They do the dirty of making that into whatever formats/etc are needed by the ASICs on that line card (running code loaded at line card bootup from the RE!). As packets come in filters are applied, routing decisions are made, and the packet is kicked over to the outgoing linecard via the fabric, or, locally. Other end the line card does a bit of the reverse, packaging it back into say an ethernet frame (possibly making it a VLAN frame, or getting way moree complicated with MACSEC and non ethernet port types!) The line cards also handle a TON of routine housekeeping stuff so the main routing engine doesn't need to. They also protect the main routing engine from DoS attacks by applying rate limiting right there on the line card for anything they hand off towards the routing engine. From very simple/common things like TTL exceeded (too many hops in transit), to some more complicated things like the ping/pong of the BFD protocol.

Impressive. Even the salvageable parts on those boards are worth a day's effort of de-soldering. Love it! 220uF tantalum SMD caps are amazing, never seen one higher than 100uF. The 32.768 KHz OCXO is definitely a keeper, I would love to put it in my all TTL logic desktop clock, replacing the already pretty accurate TCXO. Those 52V SMPS's can be ideal for RuiDeng's new lab supplies. Please do a test of those planar transformer power converter modules.

Excellent teardown. Really interesting. Treasure trove of devices

Those power connectors on the back of the power supplies and fan tray are Multibeam XL connectors... They are a standard off the shelf part made by TE Connectivity and I believe they are also licensed to other connector manufacturer's as well, so nothing custom there... Also, those "ground pins" on either end of the backplane card are probably not actually used for ground, they are most likely just alignment pins used for blind mating the daughter card. No idea what this would have cost, but a lot of familiar looking connectivity on that thing for the period... I'm an engineer for TE connectivity so this all looks familiar to me lol Also, you nailed the high speed mezzanine connector, made by Samtec and TE... you must be some kind of expert or something! EDIT: looks like this response wasn't needed lol, you pretty much said everything I did above later in the video.

If you want to see Huawei kit BT uses loads of it. Also BT uses similar kit in the exchanges to buffer BT TV offerings to keep the backbone clearer of traffic.

I was surprised to see the Davinci dm8168 in there. I have spent a lot of time over the last few years working with the little brother to that part (the dm8148), and they can only be described as a hot mess. TI has effectively dropped all support for the part and there are some really nasty silicon bugs to contend with, but for a part that was released in 2010 they have an amazingly fast hardware h.264 encoder built in that is still as fast as almost anything you can buy today. The soul of that part lives on in the Sitara AM57xx series, but hopefully with fewer silicon bugs.

24:28 HiSilicon ic which makes processors for phones and other stuff. It's mainly used in Huawei smartphones from what I see.

The optical ports are probably angled so the rack door can close without putting too tight of a bend on the fiber optic cables.

"tight as a nun's nasty" haha, took me a second, never heard that one

I've got a customer that I do IT consulting for who has a similar video conferencing system from Cisco that cost around a million USD to install. But it is an incredibly trick setup.

The ports are angled for ease of cable management. Lets you route the fiber into cable management on the side of a server rack without needing extreme radius bends that can damage the fiber.

It's mind-boggling to consider all the coordination and man-hours that went into the design and creation of this hardware. It's like watching you disassemble a skyscraper.

From Wikipedia: "Cortina is a fabless semiconductor company. It outsources all semiconductor manufacturing to merchant foundries. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California. It also has other research and development sites in Hsinchu (Taiwan), Ottawa (Canada), Raleigh (USA) and Shanghai (China). "

@22:21 the made in Canada module looks like IBM Bromont, Canada module. Part number format looks right for that too.

Liking the swift, ultra-pro editing on this mailbag. Keep it up!

@EEVblog the spikes are for blind mating boards, they're pretty common for modular designs like this. Grounded more for safety than anything else, it's really just a mechanical feature.

I like all the added datasheets and extra info added to this video. It's better than watching your hands wave around a plastic stick while you make educated gueses about what something might be :)

As retired test engineer, the testhardware boards has 8 to 12 layers, a tickness of 3.2 mm and gold finish on outsider layers. Test machine connectors ends always whit a bed of pogo-pins. You do not mention the jtag bus on this system with is full whit high pincount bga devices mostly designed in the US.

Huawei is making a looooot of stuff, not only LTE/5G but wired network (dwdm, enterprise routers, switches, access points, gpon so ftth), servers, power supply devices.

One thing that strikes me: i's not very old! Well, it could be defective - but such expensive devices should run for many years. Not even 10 years old, and now in the bin. That is terrible!

20:37 "Tight as a nun's nasty inside" omfg I'm using this

I at beginning didn't like this channel but now I'm such a fan x thankyou

There are circular diamond saws designed to drill into ceramic tiles. Put one in a drill press, then drill around one of those pins from the power supply, and then you can desolder that bit of pcb on there much easier.

Those board-to-board connectors could be Samtec QSTRIP/QPAIRS or something from the Molex mezzanine line. I got to know them when I was hand soldering a few of the former brand onto test fixtures for testing just a CPU+MEM control board assy on high-end test and measurement gear. It was quite a challange for the first time!

9:50 - I remember seeing all SONY monitors at the OJ trial back in 1995!

I think the SFP ports are at an angle to make the fiber have less strain on the connector.

It has to be big to fit all the spy gear in there. I‘ve got a 2KW PSU less then half of this 750W one. What happens in >4x the space? Is it the Powerline demodulator and Internet gateway for all the other bugs in the neighbourhood? A Mains-Transient generator to fry critical IT infrastructure? Bad-Powerfactor Generator to bankrupt the electricity supplier and cause blackouts because of subsequent layoffs ? )

I'm still not sure what this thing does. It seems way too complicated (and expensive) to be a video transcoder.

Why do I get the feeling this was used in something for state or federal government ( not security to be fair ) and was removed precisely because it's Huawei ?

omg dave lol, "tight as a nun's nasty!?" hahahh good stuff

In a former life, I worked with and deployed several realtime mpeg4 transcodey things in the early days of ip video. Tandberg, RGB, motorola, scientific atlanta. This brings back the memories. Likely it was before Huawei was on the scene, but all built up to a price. Advancements/features, to be supported in the codecs, were so uncertain that fpga's pretty much needed to be used for transcoding. We also rolled our own picture in picture transcode service, using commodity hardware. 24 streams per U if I recall. Was a fun project in the way back times.

Probably more processing power in this beast than in the Northern Territory. Hello from NZ.

HiSilicon develops SoCs based on ARM architecture. Though not exclusive, these SoCs see preliminary use in handheld and tablet devices of its parent company Huawei.

One of the power supplies is for backup if the otherone fails.

Nice a long video! Great Job! But the chip in the middle of the 9 chip Board looks different. Might that eventually be some kind of switch os something like that perhaps?

There are lots of chip fabs in Canada! WPIXF1104BE.B1-900204 is an ethernet controller. those tilted cans hold 10Gb ethernet SFP's. The small form-factor pluggable is a compact, hot-pluggable network interface module used for data communications over fibre optic links

As long as the XTZ accelerator can keep up with the QN rate when overclocked and the local MOSFET thermal reactance controllers don’t max out when power vector polarity morphs from linear non-phase reactance to non-standard decoder channel proxy configurators especially when positronic differentiation differs from radial expansion levels-I’m cool with it.

The BOM cost must indeed be enormous! Dang, I wonder how much you could make by selling the components of that thing... I'd happily pay a a few bucks for some of them ;)

A 1GB PATA SSD? You know, we call them CF cards now.

That HL part is from HiSilicon a subsidiary of Huawei.

Checked it out on LBRY. Video quality on youtube is better than LBRY. They might be restricted to 2k (1080p) or their compression codec sucks. LBRY doesn't show you the res you're viewing so you can only go by appearance. The web version of LBRY just buffers forever, but the win10 app version will actually play videos.

Notice that on the audio board, where there are 9 chips for 8 channels--the center chip does not have two little chips peeking out from under the heatsink. Some kind of controller?

21:55 You can bend it in horizontal, but you can`t bend it in vertical. It works like a stiffener.