Thursday 29 October 2015

Teardown: LeCroy HVL100 Discriminator Hybrid IC

I found this hybrid IC in the analog front end of the Packard Liquid Scintillation Analyser i took apart some time ago.

As it was a hybrid i saved it to take a look at in the future and today i removed it's cover to see inside.

The IC has a standard 16 pin DIL pinout but is an oversized package. The package is ceramic with bonded gold plated pins. The top cover is also ceramic which is glued on top of the main body.

The HVL100 is manufactured by LeCroy, famous for their high-end oscilloscopes and other test equipment. It is a discriminator and is a combination of the LeCroy MVL407 4 Channel Comparator and the Motorola MC10198 Monostable Multivibrator. The HVL100 here dates from 1996 and the following text is from it's datasheet:




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After some heating with a hot-air gun i was able to remove the top cover.

Inside is a ceramic substrate with the components bonded to it and usual gold bondwires connecting the silicon devices to the ceramic substrate.

There are a couple of ceramic capacitors and two main integrated circuits, i would hazard a guess the central one is the main LeCroy MVL407 comparator , you can easily see the 4 sections in the die. The smaller device to the right is the Motorola MC10198.

Notice also the blue covering on some of the signal traces, generally this seems to be when a bond wire passes over the trace so maybe this is to reduce capacitance between the two traces?

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Motorola MC10198. Note the copyright indication in the top right corner.

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LeCroy MVL407.