Name that Ware September 2008!

The Ware for September 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

This is another user-submitted ware, this time from tmbinc. Thanks for the submission! Beautiful photo as well. Hopefully some readers will find this game a positive distraction from all that bad news about the economy…

20 Responses to “Name that Ware September 2008!”

  1. Peter Knight says:

    Hmm… with that power supply on the top left and the extra chip and crystal, this is no normal flash drive. Looks like something computational – and that looks like an ARM logo under the mosaic. I suspect that middle chip is a computation specific ASIC with an ARM core. Could this be the Elgato Turbo.H264? http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/Accessories/Turbo264/product1.en.html

  2. Nick B says:

    First go at one of these, so let’s see what we have…

    Obviously a USB peripheral. The cy7c68013A is a Cypress USB peripheral bridge with an embedded 8051 mcu and serial bridge, so that’ll be the mechanism for talking to the obscured chip in the centre, which is directly interfaced to the large chip on the left, which is an 8-bit flash part. U5 looks like a higher-speed crystal for the obscured chip.

    More-meta analysis: The silkscreening isn’t very good and the soldermask seems to be a bit flakey, so it looks like it was made on the cheap, probably in the Far East. The use of large-footprint ICs contrasted with the BGA/QFN (can’t quite see) centre IC makes me think it’s only available in that package, so this looks like a cheap USB carrier board solely to provide infrastructure for that chip to operate. Since the top of the USB connector is shown, it seems unlikely that there are any large connectors – you’d expect them to be on the top side of the board – otherwise I might have suspected a DVB tuner, though the board looks a little old for that! If the close cropping and specular reflections at the top and bottom of the picture are just a coincidence (and not trying to hide external connectors) then there are either no external connectors at all, or they’re surface-mount and mounted on the back of the board out of sight. If the former then I’d suspect a software security dongle (doing offboard key verification or somesuch), if the latter then maybe a SIM card reader with storage for multiple SIM reads?

    How did I do? :-)

  3. Fred Blasdel says:

    I’d guess that it’s a combined USB Flash Disk + Wireless Mouse dongle.

    The manufacturers (eg. Gyration) figure that it doesn’t hurt to throw in

  4. Fred Blasdel says:

    (the end of my comment was eaten due to an unescaped less-than)

    The manufacturers (eg. Gyration) figure that it doesn’t hurt to throw in less than a dollar’s worth of flash for you to put your slides on, for when you use your special wireless presenter mouse on other people’s computers.

  5. Mastro Gippo says:

    It’s a video card! No, wait. Why does it have the same code on the PCB? Is it the ID of the PCB manufacturer?
    http://foros.maximopc.org/showpost.php?s=a2d5c88d22258989b8adeb723a53c854&p=252736&postcount=5
    Oh well.

  6. Peter Knight says:

    (Repost as last one got stuck in the ether somewhere)

    Small Flash, signs of a dual power supply rails in the top left, a second crystal, no signs of another connector or antenna. This looks like a coprocessor with an IO and core power rail, which sounds like an high speed ASIC, maybe with an onboard CPU. The two things that would most likely benefit from acceleration would be encryption and video compression.

    From the cosmetic similarity, I’d guess the Elgato Turbo.264 H.264 compressor.

  7. DJFelix says:

    Judging by the 16MB (128Mb) flash chip and the model number in the middle, I’d have to guess that it’s some kind of USB video extender (VGA adapter) or video capture device.

  8. Jean Berniolles says:

    I’m gonna try to stole Peter Knight victory by naming the nemesis of the Elgato: ADS Tech Instant Video To-Go H.264 Video Transfer Accelerator.
    I checked the driver and that one uses a Cypress chip.
    Also, maybe because tmbinc wanted to buy one of those cheaper device (compared to the Elgato) and see how thew worked or make an alternative driver, because the official app sux.

  9. A. Snare says:

    As others have stated, on the right is a Cypress Semiconductor USB bridge.

    I think the Samsung chip is 16MB of DRAM, not flash. (The part number ends with an ‘I’, not a 1 as I first read it.) It’s a 2005/2006 part currently in EOL, which would suggest this gizmo is a few years old. Specs are at http://www.samsung.com/global/system/business/semiconductor/product/2007/7/7/560639ds_k4s28xx32i_rev11.pdf

    On the top-right, I think we have a timing crystal. The numbers ’24’ could indicate 2.4GHz, which is the band that WiFi and bluetooth operate in. People mention there’s no antenna: I don’t see why track around the edge couldn’t be an antenna, or it could be etched on the reverse side.

    So to hazard a guess, maybe we have a USB WiFi (802.11g?) or BlueTooth (16MB RAM to run the stack? Doubtful) peripheral.

  10. Ben Hutchings says:

    The big memory chip is 128 Mbit SDRAM, not flash. I’m having trouble identifying the little chip in the top middle. However, there are two obvious traces from the USB interface/uC which could be an I2C bus, and that can boot from an I2C EEPROM, so perhaps that is what is is.

  11. roby says:

    hey we got a winner!… Instant Video-To-Go (RDX-160)…. steal answer and google-ing them is not fair :)

  12. Theo Markettos says:

    U5=40MHz, I think.

    The 8 bit SOIC has pins 2/3/4/8 connected to supply rails of some kind. That looks like it might be a 24Cxx I2C EEPROM device with A0-A2 connected to rails. From the numbering I’d guess an Atmel 24C32.

    It’s not going to be any storage device given the excess of SDRAM. The board house ‘E248779’ seems to be involved in graphics stuff so that’s possible.

    However the gold ring filling with vias around the outside suggests perhaps RF functionality. But I would have expected screening cans and vias for them if that it was a serious wireless device.

    The BGA can’t be a huge volume device – look at the date codes: whole board=2007wk38, BGA=2006wk2, SDRAM=2007wk31, USBuC=2007wk13, EEPROM=2007wk22 (probably). That means there has to be a good reason why it’s almost 20 months older than the rest of the chips.

  13. Jesse says:

    Is it an IronKey?

  14. Donald says:

    It’s an Elgato Turbo264. The obscurred chip is a Mobilygen MG1264.

    In response to Jesse’s “Is it an IronKey?”: If you’ve ever tried to open an IronKey you’d know this isn’t an IronKey. I’d love to see some reverse engineering attempts on the IronKey though. It’s filled with epoxy so will not make for a fun time.

  15. Jesse says:

    Whoops. Maybe I should do some research beforehand… Another guess then. An RFID Reader/programmer?

  16. Nick says:

    Well it’s got the cypress 8051+usb2.0 tranceiver chip that’s in every USB2.0 device ever. That little 8-pin pdip is probably the serial flash with it’s firmware, and then the 24mhz crystal is for generating the usb2.0 reference clock (which normally is a 48mhz reference on motherboards but I digress). Attached to the blurred out chip is a Samsun 128mb DDR DRAM (going from the K4 prefix and their part decoder). So it might be a usb driver still, if the nand chips are on the other side of the pcb and the dram is used as a disk cache that could be reasonable.

  17. Erant says:

    The big crystal is a 24MHz oscillator, and is used by the Cypress chip. The 40MHz oscillator is for the BGA package, and is probably connected to a PLL. The small SOIC chip reads ATMLN722, which isn’t something I could find… Could ofcourse easily be something by ATMEL, going by the abbreviation. The inductances and capaticances go into there (there are some thicker traces then required on the right hand side of the chip), so I’d say this is a switching power converter. Probably to supply the cypress with 3.3v, or the BGA chip with even lower voltages.

    There are no connectors whatsoever on the thing, so it can’t be any video output device, combine that with the fact that it’s sporting quite a bit of RAM leads me to indeed believe that this is a video decompressing accelerator of some kind.

    Going by earlier comments, and googling a bit, you can come across images like http://www.mailamac.nl/images/default_shop/turbo264.jpg

    It has the same curvature on the back, it’s black, and about the same size. This is an Elgato 264 hardware video accelerator indeed.

  18. Angel Langley says:

    sdos9tceb4kc0dec

  19. Dan says:

    Hey…

    I don’t mean to change the subject, but where did u ppl learn to code websites?…

  20. My Domain says:

    Joe…

    Check out my domain sometime….