LeCroy has been eaten by Teledyne - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Leo Bodnar
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2012, 09:23:25 pm
content: Got this through email today:QuoteOh yes, baby, it will join big happy family but remain autonomous. Dream away, can't remember this ever successfully tried before.I can see how Agilent has been partially responsible for this. They have given other scope makers a tough year.Expect Coca-Cola putting a rival bid for Tektronix.Leo

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2012, 09:29:47 pm
content: no need.. Trektopnix is already owned by the Danaher corporation which also 'sucked up' Keithley and Fluke ...

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 05:41:50 am
content: First thing Teledyne should do is to go on a manhunt inside LeCroy, smoking out the idiot who thought rebranding Atten junk as LeCroy was a clever idea.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 06:22:00 am
content: Hah ! Youd have to fire 2/3 of the company... Since 2/3 of the lecroy scopes are actually made by iwatsu in japan...As for the remaining 1/3. You can label those LeCrap... I can tell you horror stories of my experiences with their scopes. Unbelievable bugs.. To the point they lied. You select an are to zoom in on and it shows you a totally different are without any visual clue. Trace buffers getting corrupted. Old data being moxed with new data. Rotating a knob too fast males the maachine freeze. Endless triggering and calibrating messages. And these were 40k$ machines.... Asfter a lot of phone calls to explain them how to reproduce these issues ( they couldn't 'find' them) they finally sent me a beta version after two months and asked me to test the beta and verify the issues were gone.... 45k$ , 2 months waiting and now i uave to test the beta ? Sorry.. Byebye...

author: codeboy2k
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 06:39:53 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 29, 2012, 09:29:47 pmYeah, how that ever got past anti-trust laws, I'll never know. I guess because they don't (yet) own Agilent , the regulators were happy with having just one decent competitor in the marketplace.

author: Dark Prognosis
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 06:43:26 am
content: What the hell is going on in the corporate world these days? Seems like one huge circle jerk lately where ever company I loved is getting eaten up by someone else and they eventually get eaten up. Eventually they will all be owned by The One Hung Lo company.

author: nanofrog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 06:54:10 am
content: Got the same email.Sadly, I think codeboy2k is probably right. So long as there's a single true competitor, then the US gov't is fine with it.Perhaps Teledyne can turn things around though, so it may not be a bad thing (recall Ideal's purchase of S-K improving the product quality).free_electron:How many man-hours did you waste on that?

author: Dark Prognosis
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 07:10:23 am
content: Quote from: nanofrog on May 30, 2012, 06:54:10 amWell, the govt here in the states is a bit wishy washy when it concerns anti-trust etc... laws as of late. Back with the last president it really started to show how lop sided things are. For example your town has a cable tv provider for the internet and dialup 33.6kbps. Guess what that dialup is classified as a competitor so anti-trust laws do not apply.So, never count on it and when everything is bought up the prices will skyrocket too.

author: chrome
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 07:40:05 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 29, 2012, 09:29:47 pmThis joke will fly over a lot of people's heads.Maar het blijft een goeie.

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 08:03:45 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2012, 06:22:00 amWhat are the 2/3 like?We had an Iwatsu analog at the Tv Tx,& it was a good instrument.

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2012, 08:33:16 am
content: Thinking back to the original post,Teledyne have a good reputation in the RF field.I've run into a lot of their passive stuff over the years,& it's all been top quality.I had a vague idea that they had taken over Coaxial Dynamics,or Bird some years back,but no sign of this when I Googled.Just senility raising its head,I guess!

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2012, 08:21:10 am
content: UpsQuotehttp://www.cnbc.com/id/47638912(Warning, the link points to advertisement disguised as "news")

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2012, 11:09:54 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2012, 06:22:00 amWhat do you mean, the WaveJet line? Honestly I severely doubt that they make 2/3 of LeCroy's sales.The "real" LeCroy scopes are the WaveSurfer and WaveRunner scopes anyway and IMHO Iwatsu has nothing to offer that comes even close to a WaveSurfer...Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2012, 06:22:00 amWell, for me (and nearly all the people I work with) it's actually quite the opposite. IMHO Agilent and Tektronix have nothing to offer in the 8k€ to 16k€ range that could compete with a WaveSurfer or WaveRunner. Especially feature-wise and regarding measurement accuracy. R&S and Yokogawa might be a more serious competition, but they're a bit exotic and actually I never saw one of these in real life.I just wished Lecroy would stop rebranding Atten/Siglent crap in their (actually not so) low cost range and they could finally update the WaveJet range to be a bit more competitive.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2012, 01:51:39 pm
content: Wavejet wavesurfer waverunner are iwatsu hardware... Lecroy crapware.My problem was with a Waverunner 104mxi. Thats a 32000$ scope...I spent 3 full days trying to troubleshoot an fpga design, that, according to modelsim should work right, but according to the scope did not... The scope was lying. It would tell you it triggered but on some traces it would show old data... Or it would lose the time alignment between traces. Or you would zoom in, zoom out and have no clue what you are looking at, or lose the trace data altogether.I was ready to take a hammer to it.I shipped it back to them and i 'modified' ( with a sharpie permanent marker ) the 'oy' in their logo to 'ap,I made a 15 page presentation with screenshots and procedure to follow to reproduce the problems. After numerous phonecalls they finally came back 'we cant reproduce these problems. So i sat on the phone for hours telling them , like talking to a lttle kid, "hit factory default. Connect probe to calibrator output. Set trigger to single , rotate this knob one click left , move corsor to center, rotate knob one click right. What do you see ?". Deafening silence for a minute and then a sheepish answer " ah yes... Thats not right.And then they go off for 2 months and send me a "beta" that i have to test for them ?No more. I refuse to touch these machines. They are unreliable.And there are tons of other annoyances with them . Every few minutes they need to 'calibrate' a process that takes 5 to 10 seconds' . Can't you guys design an a/d that does not drift so bad ?Try troubleshooting a system when ever so often the machine is blind because it has to do something. It is really getting on your nerves after a while.Calibrating .. Triggering .. Acquiring .. No wait calibrating again... Aaaargh ! Just show me a goddams signal you pile of assorted junk in a box.And the amount of times the spftware locks up is incredible. It suffices to spin the timebase knob fast forward and backwards and its little brain freezes ! Remeber on an analog scope you would grab the timebase knob and just wing it until you got to see your signal ? Cant do that on the lecroy .. It'll crash and you have to reboot it...And they cant even desogn a proper rotary encoder algorithm either. If you use one of the scroll buttons to move the trace on the screen it either crawls like a snail and after a few clicks becomes a racehorse that puts the viewport at the far end. It is aggravating to work with.And as for theirprobes... The tips break off very easily , you pull the grabber pff and the pin comes out off the probe and sits in the grabber with no way to pull it out or get the grabber back on the probe.All their current probes are made by hioki and sold at 5x the price.I really hate those machines. Whenever there is a convention and there is a lecroy booth i walk in and go spin all the knobs on all the machines so they lock up for all to see.The rohde and schwarz scope is pretty nice. I had one on demo for a few weeks and sort of 'beta'd it for a while. They some kinks to work out. The hardware is solid. The software is solid too in terms of not locking up , but it has too many menu layers. The triggering alone requires no less than three different windows to be open. You set level and select channels in one , assign trigger co dition ( ch1 low , ch2 rising, ch3 no care and ch4 high ) in another and if you need tot apply glitch or runt trigger thats another window open.Some things are abit awkward too. Remove a trace ? Ehhhh stange..Normally you assime that if you push the vertical button the trace goes on, push it again it goes off. Not with RS. Push is on , push again is set parameters.. Only way to turn itoff is to take the mouse , go to the trashcan icon , click there then click on the trace you want to remove....In other words : the scope basic operations are not all controllable through the knobs and dials on the frontpanel. On an agilent i very rarely need to grab the mouse. In fact the only times you need the mouse is when yo also need the keyboard.. Like entering a filename to save.. Or if you want to drag a specific measurement onto a signal , or draw a specific zoom area. Anything else is done through the front panel. This is important on bench.. You already have a ton of boards , wires and other muck on the bench and now you need to make room for a keyboard and a mouse too.... Thats a bit much , especially if there is already a computer on the bench with kbd/mouse.But overall the RS is a solid design. Give them some time. Theyll get there. Their a/d is really good, and they are the only scope that has a true 1mv per div without a 1 division noiseband on screen !

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 12:21:45 am
content: Well, I'm working with a 6Zi on a daily basis and also worked very often with a 64MXI (first series) and I love both of them. I must admit though that the 64MXI really had some trigger issues that were cured with an update two years ago or so where also the trigger on both edges was implemented. And the only time the 6Zi ever crashed on me was when I played around in some Matlab menu points. Then again, our Agilent 7000A scopes all had an issue with one of the rotary encoders freezing up and sometimes claiming that they were in AC mode though they weren't. These issues remained for several years until a firmware update finally fixed them.Anyway, every time I'm forced to work with e.g. an Agilent 7000A it feels like I lost one arm. There are so many things that Agilent and Tektronix scopes in the same price range just can't do and both have only very crudely implemented auto measurements and statistics compared to a WaveRunner.Besides, when I look in the Iwatsu homepage, the only digital scopes they offer is the DS-5500 line with 1MPoints of memory. Also when searching for Lecroy and Iwatsu, it is quite clear that LeCroy bought their product line in 2006 to sell them as WaveJets. I can't find any indication that Iwatsu was or is in any way involved in the development or production of the higher lines.Instead, some site commented on that WaveJet agreement that "For more than 10 years Iwatsu distributed certain low-end LeCroy products in Japan, and LeCroy provided Iwatsu with oscilloscope components and technology for a low-end product line, which Iwatsu sold directly in the Japanese market.".

author: codeboy2k
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 01:23:08 am
content: Quote from: Bored@Work on June 02, 2012, 08:21:10 amYes, they appear to be preparing a class action suit, on their own, without anyone coming to them first, and they are looking for lead plaintiffs.That's pretty sleazy and should be illegal. But that's a law firm just acting normal ...

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 01:58:28 am
content: I know for a fact they are iwatsus. Because i took one apart and all the scope boards clearly have the iwatsu logo on them ...I have a 7zi at work.. Piece of junk. Its worse than a hoover vacuum. As soon as you turn any kind of calculation on the noise is deafening and ot feels like you are sitting in the exhaust of a jet engine...Lecroy crunches everything on the pc as opposed of having asic do the heavy lifting.The pop out frontpanel sometimes stops working. It loses usb connection , even though we never remove it.. In the middle of a debig session the thing just craps out. Unplug and replug , then it work again. Scrolling is a nightmare, its either too slow, and when you think , ok i am going to turn the knob just a little bit faster. .. Whoosh you are of the screen...They also have tremendous blind time because all data needs moving through the pc every time. We have deep memory 128meg. And it takes a good second before the screen repaints.. During that second the scope is blind. If you are fishing for a glitch and it happens then the machine will never trigger.They are good if you are into statistical stuff and matlab postprocessing, but then you are better off with a fast digitizer like an acquiris. As a fast scope to be used to look at live signals and search for problems in a circuit ? Meh ... Too frustrating... Scope finally triggers and in the middle of filling its buffer it begins calibrating the a/d .. Wtf ?I need a scope that responds very quickly, has fast screen redraw, deep memory and does not interfere with what i am doing. I need to be able to capture the entire spinup sequence of a harddisk motor... Takes over 3 seconds and our pwm is 500khz or more. So i need to sample at least at 40Msamples/ second to restitute anything meaningful and trap any kind of glitch or jitter in the sequence. Hence the deep memory i need.Now agilent has released the 9000 series and i got one on demo over christmas week. My next machine is going to be that. Responsive, fast screen update simple zooming ( as opposed to the crap multiscreen zooms. Here is another of my frustrations with lecroy. I store a reference signal in math memory , 4 channels. I now acquire a live stream. If i scroll through this live stream i want the triggerpoints to stay in sync , so the live scrolls in sync with the stored...they can't do it! If i select an area to zoom , it only zooms live. Stored does not follow.. How am i supposed to compare anything in detail if there is no timelock possible.. Their answer is . Wel you dump the buffers and post process it in matlab.. Wrong answer.... Agilent can do it. I dont even have to tell the scop i want a lock... It is by default.

author: T4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 06:41:23 am
content: free_electron's always the right one ...You think he's kidding?

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 09:27:02 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 03, 2012, 01:58:28 amGiven the history of the Iwatsu/LeCroy relationship this can mean everything or nothing. Surely there is some kind of cooperation. But maybe Iwatsu just produces the PCBs or whatever. Anyway, this is definitely a different kind of cooperation than the rebranding of Siglent/Atten for the entry level crap. And to claim that Lecroys are Iwatsus just because of a logo on a PCB but without Iwatsu having any product even close to a WaveRunner/WaveSurfer makes this claim a bit questionable.Quote from: free_electron on June 03, 2012, 01:58:28 amAgreed, the PC based design makes LeCroy scopes a bit louder than the Agilent scopes I know. Then again, this design adds flexibility and makes it easier to access all the options. Other scopes in this price range simply don't have the options and the GUIs of the non-windows Agilent and Tek scopes are very basic in comparison. Besides, for a definition of loud, try an Agilent logic analyzer (PC/Window based of course). I have one on my desk but never use it as it's unbelievably loud. Compared to that, the LeCroys are dead silent.Quote from: free_electron on June 03, 2012, 01:58:28 amI figure they are in the 200k€ range, so ten times the price of a 7zi. Just out of curiosity: will these at least measure in the sample buffer? All Agilent scopes I know up to the 20k€ range measure in the display buffer which makes them kinda worthless for certain tasks...

author: T4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 10:42:31 am
content: Have you heard of pure rebranding but the company who made them doesn't sell it?Many companies do it so i am not surprised, the PCB makes up the main component means if Iwatsu designed the board Iwatsu has the rights to place their name on the silkscreen and therefore they made the scope basically

author: nixxon
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 12:39:30 pm
content: QuoteDoes anyone actually know which company LeCroy cooperated with to develop theWaveStation Waveform Generator?Many claim that this company was Atten. This connection is probably solely based on the outer casing resemblence between the LeCroy WaveStation and the Atten ATF1000B- (and ATF1000D) series.How do we know that the other company is not i.e. Siglent? Siglent make way better Signal Generators (SDG1000 series) than Atten, even though both companies use casings that look almost identical (BNC output positions are slightly different). The insides and specs of these two manufacturers AWG's are totally different.I have received e-mails from both Atten and Siglent representatives, and they both deny any connection between the two companies.(...)"Siglent produce their SDG 1000 series,and we produce our own ATF xx series,if you have any question,please contact me freely.Best Regards!CindyNanjing Glarun-Atten Technology Co., Ltd.A-8, 6th Floor, Tanglang Industrial Zone,Xili, Nanshan, Shenzhen, 518055, P.R.China.Tel: 86-755-61618238Fax: 86-755-61618298Cell:86-15914096281www.attenelectronics.com"Similar casings are even made by Aktacom (AWG-41xx series) and MyWave (MFG-3000- and MFG-6000CH series) as well.Maybe they simply copy each others casings and develope their own internals?nixxonLinks to the lookalikes:http://www.attenelectronics.com/productBody.aspx?id=147&bid=28&sid=101http://www.tmatlantic.com/e-store/index.php?SECTION_ID=299http://www.szmywave.com/categoryen.php?id=33&lang=enhttp://www.lecroy.com/wavestation/?mid=1043

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 01:35:35 pm
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on June 03, 2012, 09:27:02 amthat may be. I am not going to speculate on that. Fact is lecroy needs to have their machines built by someone else because they dont have own fabs, as opposed to tek and agilent...Quotei have a 16702b ( hpux based ) . The lecroy overpowers that easily... The problem is that the lecroy is virtually silent when it is not really doing anything. You got it in single shot and unarmed and it is quit. Ver quit. You hit th single button, where it arms the triggering system and in half a second the thing is deafening. Wheeeeeeeeee. Its like a herd of mosquitos. They really should have used large diameter fans as opposed to 5 tiny screamers.QuoteQuoteand no... Thats the beauty... Start at 23k$ ... I kitted one out with same memory depth , bandwidth as the 7zi... 43000$ and you get a free 3000x on top of it. We bought two. Delivery expected next month. Did t want the 3000x as it is not usefull for us so they gave us 3k$ more discount.The 9000 runs on an older intel mobile processor at 1.6ghz. All there is is two 9cm slow turning fans.I had the thing on at full throttle 4 chanels , max sampling , maths combining multiple channels yielding 3 output signals and running fft on all three of them. Not so much as a whisper from the machine. And the user interface and screen update didnt even slow down. Do that on the lecroy and it grinds to a halt.The difference ? Agilent does all the calculation and the fft in hardware.Also the pattern decoders are impressive. Show you in real time an excel like list of what was detected when. Click on an item and it scrolls the trace to that point in time. Very impressive machine.so ten times the price of a 7zi. Just out of curiosity: will these at least measure in the sample buffer? All Agilent scopes I know up to the 20k€ range measure in the display buffer which makes them kinda worthless for certain tasks...

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2012, 01:47:16 pm
content: The general word on the street is that Atten founded Siglent in response to a lawsuit brought by Rigol, about Atten copying Rigol oscilloscopes. Rigol won, and Atten simply moved the stuff to Siglent, rebranded it and continued to sell it.One indication of strong ties is that Siglent oscilloscopes use EasyScope PC software. EasyScope is the software Atten originally created and bundled with their oscilloscopes. And, surprise, surprise, the LeCroys come with EasyScope, too.Whoever owns the companies these days, the similarities between the oscilloscopes and function generators still indicates some links between the companies. And it can't just be rough copying, otherwise Atten would have ripped Siglent and LeCroy another one for ripping off their oscilloscopes, the PC software and the function generators.As for Aktacom, everything they sell is rebranded stuff. Some comes from Owon, others from Atten/Siglent. I don't think they do anything on their own. And MyWave? Likely also just rebranded Atten/Siglent. Atten/Siglent is a company that doesn't care much about their brands. If you give them enough money and ask for a certain production volume they print whatever label you like on the front panel instead of their own.

author: chscholz
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 05, 2012, 12:45:35 pm
content: Tektronix is using the same SiGe fab as LeCroy (i.e. IBM in NY).I'd like talk to you. I will be in SJC this Th and Fr. Please let me know when you are available so we can synchronize schedules.ChrisQuote from: free_electron on June 03, 2012, 01:35:35 pm

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 05, 2012, 02:36:48 pm
content: Quote from: chscholz on June 05, 2012, 12:45:35 pmSent you a PM.Tektronix used to have their own silicon fab : maxtec. This was a partnership between maxim and tek. But then a management change at tek , where the beancounters became in charge ( and not the engineers that wanted to make a stellar product ) did some nasty things which led that thing to explode. People left .. And maxim pulled the plug. This was the period just before the tds 500 scopes.So the next generation machines like the TDS machines, tektronix had to clamber for some other semiconductor provider.. And they went to national semiconductor.If you rip a tds , or the later portable lcd based models apart , they are all natsemi asics.And then that went to hell as well...Now they are down to fpga's , powerpc based processors and some front ends fabbed at ibm..How the mighty have fallen.Agilent still makes their own frontends( they have waferfabs with the exotic GaAs and SiGe processes ). The big digital monster is their design but fabbed by a large semicon provider because agilent does not have fabs for normal si process , or fineline. )

author: chscholz
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 05, 2012, 05:51:06 pm
content: Thanks! Let's talk.ChrisQuote from: free_electron on June 05, 2012, 02:36:48 pm