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Welcome Mark and Joe Garrison from Saleae!
- The idea for Saleae started back in 2005. Prior to it becoming a day job, Joe worked at LeapFrog (not leapmotion).
- Saleae now has 9 employees, 3 of which are sw devs.
- The new pro logic family was started using crowdfunding.
- Chris didn’t like this idea when he heard about it because he thought Saleae was a much bigger company.
- There is a great picture of all the members of the team on the about page.
- Dave mentioned the Osborn (computer) effect. The 1st rule of sales: sell what you have
- Cashflow is super important in business, especially hardware. Saleae got “Net30” from a few distributors but it didn’t always cover the entire part order.
- When Apple started, they were able to finagle ridiculous payment terms (Net90 payments for parts, asking for Net10 for payment from customers)
- One thing that is lacking for hw companies is good forecasting software. They ended up writing “Saleae ERP” to deal with it.
- Saleae does use some CMs, even though there is a desire to bring production in house. It seems like a good idea because you pay per placement and the Logic Pro 8 has 500 parts (!).
- When attempting the in house manufacturing with a new pick and place, they didn’t realize the problems they would have with certain parts. Specifically the 0201 parts. There are also BGA parts on board that didn’t cause too many issues.
- Their PnP machine was from Mancorp (who work with addafruit, sparkfun, pololu). Saleae was asking for tighter specs that the equipment wasn’t quite able to hit, causing havoc for production schedules.
- For manufacturing in house, Joe recommends:
- Find other CMs building similar products.
- Build a board on the machine before buying.
- Lease instead of buy if you decide to jump in.
- The main problem with the 0201 parts was tombstoning (when a part goes up on one end). This can be cause by things like:
- Pad size variations.
- Uneven paste.
- Unoptimized heat profiles in the reflow oven.
- Slight misplacement of parts.
- Saleae had a vapor phase instead of a traditional reflow oven.
- Distributors like Avnet gave them bonded inventory, allowing payment upon receipt (freeing up cashflow).
- One of the key points of differentiation is the software: it is built for user friendliness and optimizes for an abundance of resources. The logic triggering is in software.
- A few years ago Saleae decided to go cross platform and programming switched from C# to C++.
- A large problem with the original Logic and Logic16 was counterfeiting cloning in China. It was due to using the common FX2 chipset but having a great software built on top of it. They prefer Saleae over an open source alternative like SigRok.
- Instead of taking the FTDI (and other logic analyzer on the market) route of bricking the counterfeit device, Saleae is hands off with counterfeiters, requesting that customers buy the real thing.
- The price of a clone design was about 1/10th the price of a Saleae product.
- The key crack was in the bitstream for the FPGA. 2 fans of the company reverse engineered the FPGA over a year’s time and replaced the bitstream in the software loader. There was a post detailing how they did it on Chinese forums.
- Saleae attempted to push a change to the firmware to see how fast it got fixed in China. It took 48 hours.
- The new Logic and Logic Pro family has many more devices to prevent easy clones, including inside the FPGA.
- The FPGA is rather full, actually: The Logic Pro 8 has 2 slices left on the FPGA (a Spartan6 LX9)
- At the beginning of development they were attempting to use an IIR filter on the analog signals. In the end, they used a CIC filter.
- The sampling is done with a Hittite chip with 8 ADCs internally running at 50msps. Hittite was recently bought by ADI.
- Mark learned FPGAs in 2009 and programs the devices in VHDL (because he was learning that at the time).
- The key to learning the difference between VHDL/verilog is understanding the delta cycle.
- The FPGA clocks mostly at 200MHz and has some higher SERDES clocking onboard for the ADCs.
- On the higher end models they use an FX3 to talk USB3.0. It has a 32bit bus running at 100MHz.
- Most pins on the Spartan6 can be used with a SERDES module internally (with differential signaling). On higher end Spartan6 parts there are transceivers that can do high speed stuff (6 Gsps+).
Many thanks to Mark and Joe for being on the show. It was a great lesson in manufacturing, test equipment, software development and building products!
Image courtesy of Saleae.com
First half was very sad. Turns out Zbig comments were spot on:
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/saleae-logic-price-increases-and-interesting-blog-post-explanation/msg587161/#msg587161
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/saleae-logic-price-increases-and-interesting-blog-post-explanation/msg587653/#msg587653
Joe almost sunk whole company in the name of ‘as small and cool as possible’ /slaps face on a desk …..
So with all the knowledge learned in this disaster what stops them from redesigning for 0805 exactly? Is Joe still clinging to his Jobsian vision? Too bad no one asked that in the show.
Second half was packed with some serious knowledge, impressive grasp of dsp for ‘analog guy’ Chris :O. Loved it.
One thing I didnt understand – WHY bother in the first place???? Its not like you are forced to sample everything at 50msps, HMCAD1100 has external clock input. Why not simply clock it slower instead of filling 14K LEs with painstakingly optimized filtering?
I think discontinuing Logic (the first one) was a bad decision. Im sure it sold very well at adafruit/sparkfun, now Saleblah has no below 200$ product and basically forces people into ebay clones. Latest price bump was also questionable. Chinese are way over simple cloning at this point.
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Oscilloscopes-c-63_65/?terms_id=392
500MHz 16 channels $170
-“you would go out of business if you started bricking”
yes Dave, this is why USBEE is out of business …
ps: Elecia White used to work at LeapFrog.
ps2: Salewhatever name is a fail :/ Their catch phrase should be “Sale’what?”
Great show!
I used to work on a project that used FPGAs to do FIR filtering. Otherwise I would have been completely lost 😀
Well plenty of damning mistakes were made on my part, but I wouldn’t say that 0201 was all that critical here. Our original and current CM does 0201 np, as do most serious CMs in Taiwan/China/Bay Area. Most machines do 0201, but if they haven’t done 0201 in the past they may need to purchase 0201 feeders. We’re validating lots of new CMs now and it’s not a big issue. Redesigning everything now would be possible but not worth it. 0402 is what to go with btw, 0805 would be absurdly large for no reason. Also, it’s np to prototype or rework 0201 but it does need to be done under a microscope.
The most important mistakes were failure to maintain good cash and ordering forecasting (mrp), deciding to switch to in-house pick and place with out backup from CMs the entire time, as well as lack of due diligence on the machine selection. I don’t want to make light of this – this was massively messed up on my part. I should have been fired. But unfortunately that’s not possible and either is quitting so you just do what you can as best you can and try to not F up the next time around.
Unfortunately, adjusting the sample clock would not be trivial as it needs to be very low jitter for good SNR. Simple decimation (throwing away samples) would be exactly the same result and much easier. But, the analog anti-aliasing filter has to be tuned for the highest bandwidth, and making an analog high-order, adjustable anti-aliasing filter is non-trivial. Anyway if we didn’t care about aliasing then it wound’t be necessary to filter in the FPGA. Honestly I think we stressed about it more than we needed to given most customers probably would not notice, at least not until/if we add FFT analysis.
That last point is important though, because you DO want to plan for future hardware upgrades, even if that means up front investment. Adding a feature like that in software later can be a huge boost to later sales and can also reward early backers/buyers.
Joe if you are not allowed to make error’s, how are you ever going to grow?
Learning from an error is far more important, and I think the next time you would do different.
Good luck with the company and products.
Great interview. Hearing about the sort of problems these guys went through is just what we need. One has to appreciate the way they spoke about it.
Great show! The Logic16 has saved me countless hours and has helped debug some obscure problems. It is a must have product.
The FPGA discussion was a nice change. I have successfully integrated IIR filters in an FPGA. One really has to understand fixed point math (which many do not) to get what you want our of them.
The business discussion was also great. It helps put the suffering everyone goes through in perspective.
The business discussion was great, but I cannot help but wonder why young entrepreneurs don’t seek the wisdom of those that came before them more often. Some of the mistakes Joe and Mark made were classic and as Dave hinted at, could have been pointed out to them very early on by more experienced Engineers. There is a great deal of value in making your own mistakes, but some are just too costly and should be avoided when possible.
What does CM mean? It sounded like it must be something related to product fulfillment / pcb manufacturing?
I had never heard of the Logic16.. although I use a similar sounding product, LogicPort, which I imagine works the same. Great device BTW!
While there’s plenty of USB based oscilloscopes, they fall into the toy category, I’d be nice to see someone pull off a great implementation. I was kind of disappointed with the Red Pitaya.
Finally, small rant here, at the 26 min mark, you guys jump into having them explain some blog post (about pick and place I surmise), but without any back story to catch everybody up!
Sigrok is a large open source project aimed at creating a standard GUI for all types of logic analyzers, including the logic16!
http://sigrok.org/wiki/Saleae_Logic16
Great episode. Enjoyed the discussion on real world issues.
++What is CM.
CM = Contract Manufacturer