Starlink Teardown: DISHY DESTROYED!

what's up youtube as maybe you might say today we have a treat especially i have sacrificed scarlet's dish also known as dishy to the tear down god so that you can be the first to see what's inside and get an idea of how it works first a little background for those of you that aren't familiar with starlink starlink is a spacex subsidiary that's developing a constellation of over 11 900 cubesats with the objective of providing high-speed internet anywhere on the planet these cubesats will be interlinked using a free space optical communication network which basically uses lasers to communicate between satellites now light moves really fast in a vacuum so the long-term bet here is that this constellation will be able to handle a growing number of users while still maintaining target speeds of up to a gigabit per second bidirectionally and because these cubesats are in a low earth orbit in conjunction with a really innovative user terminal design latency remains super low recently i put my name on the starlink beta invite list and received an invitation to purchase the starlink equipment for around 500 typically i'm not the earliest adopter but i'm always interested in new connectivity options so i hopped on board and of course before even plugging it in to take the cert to test the service out i decided to take it apart now before we begin i want to take a second to acknowledge a few things first off i haven't produced a ton of videos so this is going to be pretty rough i didn't have any time to bring in audio for my external recorder so the sound may vary in volume in a couple places and some of the editing is not the best second as i'm making this video there are a couple of times where i call starlink either spacex or inexplicably spacelink i apologize in advance to those that i have offended third i really appreciate the opportunity to tear this down and i hope i haven't angered the starlink folks by doing so word has it that starlink has an open bug bounty so my hope is that they'd be amenable to this uh sort of documentation of their work either way this is an incredible accomplishment by the starling team and they should be proud of the work that they are doing fourth i want to preface this tear down with the fact that i'm not an rf engineer my background spans from design to hardware and software engineering but as far as i'm concerned rf is magic and should likely stay that way some mysteries are better left unsolved and finally if you do like this video or you want to see more like in the future or just help me pay for another starlink user terminal so i can actually try the service out hit the subscribe button below and smash that like button fam all right let's get started let's take our first look at starlink's user terminal device user terminal is the technical term used to refer to the device that's used by an end user to access the services provided by a network for example you as the user accessing the internet via starlink starlink apparently calls this user terminal dishy internally so i'll probably call it either that or the phased array transceiver or just the device interchangeably the first thing that's really striking is how massive this thing is supposedly 19 inches across it doesn't weigh much but that's good since it's basically a sale that you're mounting on your most valuable asset but dishi is responsible for communicating with starlink satellites using a phased array antenna which coordinates the phase or delay of the waves emitted from the transmitter to superpose waves from multiple different antenna elements into a uniform wavefront that's directed at a specific angle dishi's field of view is supposedly roughly 100 degrees meaning that it can see and communicate with satellites in a 100 degree field of view roughly 50 degrees off center on either axis in addition to having a really wide electronic field of view dishi has motors inside to tilt it or change its elevation what's clear to me is that from from looking at this is that it's not going to be easy to disassemble and it's likely going to involve hours of me cutting and adhesive etc so i'm probably going to fast forward past those parts to get to the insides all right so removing the plastic cover here i'm just going to go ahead and pop that off i've already taken this apart and just removed the screws so that we can kind of see what's going on here but removing the plastic cover you can see the mechanism that's responsible for uh controlling the elevation of uh of this dish now basically what this is comprised of are uh two motors with uh with a gearbox um so motor motor uh gearboxes and then uh each of these motors has a bevel gear uh that's attached to it and then the uh shaft this primary mounting mounting shaft has a opinion at the tip of it and that kind of uh basically these two things can counter rotate these motors can counter rotate um and that allows the um the uh the causes the the bevel gears to travel along the pinion and tilt the dish down or up now if i remove the shroud you should be able to see that mechanism so i'm just gonna again i said as i said i already unscrewed these but let's just go ahead and remove that shroud and now the mechanism is visible so as you can see um so each of these each of these motors is uh is fully enclosed um you know i think that uh if i believe that this is probably a glass fiber reinforced plastic yeah yeah so that's a glass fiber reinforced plastic uh enclosure and and there are connectors on these so the motors themselves can actually be disconnected from these little cables um and uh and i'm guessing that those are actually um probably water resistant connectors um the way that it looks like this has been designed it looks like uh like the whole thing has been designed so that this outer location this outer kind of panel that we just removed the equipment under this panel can be um uh is not is not intended to be water or moisture or dust sensitive it's intended to be very robust and that's kind of indicated to us by the fact that there's this larger um vent here it's like a gore waterproof membrane and that allows the equipment inside the enclosure to expel moisture or for the pressure to equalize between the inside of the enclosure which is uh fully sealed and the outside of the enclosure without bringing in moisture or water the other thing that kind of indicates this to me is the fact that these uh connectors these cables are sealed in here um with these little uh cable glands so these little cable glands basically uh are intended to prevent the ingress of water and and of course they're you know if you're looking at the dish um this is this direction is up um basically this is gonna you know water would drip off here anyway just given the the direction of the outlet um you know the fact that this is kind of facing down um but this is kind of an additional mechanism just to ensure that no moisture kind of comes up there now these just terminate in this very simple little um what looks like a jst style uh connector um and then same thing with ethernet connect cable uh the ethernet cable itself also terminates with this uh with this jst style connector which is having trouble coming out of the enclosure let's see what we can do there we go um and uh and this just terminates on on the main board now uh let's go ahead and pull this out and just take a closer look right disconnecting these little um you know these little clips that hold the cables for the motors in and i just want to also note kind of the attention to detail of the uh of the space lung team these cables actually have been marked um with a little a little marking that shows what area is supposed to be underneath the clip so that when they're assembling these you can align that uh that wire um or that cable appropriately um and ensure that there's enough um kind of enough play or or anything like that so that's a really nice feature just really incredible attention to detail so i'm going to go ahead and remove the closure and i'll just show you the um the gearing mechanism so taking a look at this what you can see is uh is basically again these two motors uh kind of opposing uh going in opposing directions and if we bring this up here so that you can see it a little bit better you can actually go ahead and you can twist so i can't by virtue of the fact that i don't have three hands i can't hold all of these things to actually simulate the exact way it works but you can see as i start to turn this how this pinion gear works in conjunction with these motors my guess is that you know this overall drive system is actually very simple and the fact that there are only two wires going to each motor indicates that this is probably just a brushed dc motor so it's likely that the actual elevation angle is determined by some sort of equipment inside the device um so maybe something like an accelerometer to determine the orientation relative to gravity um and of course that's going to be pretty reliable and as long as you have something like over current detection on these motors you can drive them you know using a very simple arrangement like an h bridge um and and not really have to um you know uh work work too hard or over design it it's a really nice mechanism and of course the other thing to note is that there are these hollow shafts so um you have this kind of gear box but there's actually a hollow shaft through which this ethernet cable is fed and as you kind of follow that shaft it goes actually into the center here looking down looking down from the top and i don't know if you really have enough light to see um but it does go into the center here and then the cable travels down the uh down the uh pole uh and out and out of this uh strain relief this plastic shroud fits over like this and the intention of this plastic shroud is to protect as much as possible these inner workings right so there's a little cover that will slide right that turns um kind of with the dish and as that turns it gives you a a very easy way to um to you know provide some degree of protection from larger objects entering but again i think that this outer area i suspect that this outer area of the dish is not necessarily intended to be fully ingress protected it's not fully intended to be fully protected from the elements just enough to prevent for example a tree branch from going in here but not enough to really prevent dust or water or something like that from going in because these elements in here are likely somewhat impervious to that and it does appear that they've been designed very robustly you don't necessarily need to take this aggressive an approach you know to designing this system there are other kind of gearing arrangements or or you know mechanical arrangements that would allow you to achieve that same elevation mech movement but i think that this is actually one of the more robust designs uh and you can really it really i think speaks to the intended longevity of uh of this uh overall system right they really want you to be able to put this on your roof and they want it to stay on the roof and uh you know and uh and not really require any service um on the other hand this is also just because it is a non-solid state element of this design this is also the thing that's most likely to require service and you notice that it is easily removable right it did not take long to undo those bolts and to to go ahead and actually remove the entire assembly and just replace it so this all comes out as one unit with the cable attached i think that's actually pretty cool now i want to talk for a second about dishes cable a lot of people have been asking why you can't replace the cable on your own you know why can't i just have a jack that i plug in uh you know plug my own cable into into the back of dishy well there's actually a really interesting reason for this and it has to do with power delivery um so uh dishy as as i think many users on on on youtube have noted consumes around 100 watts of power and the trick with that is that that power is actually delivered over the data lines or over spare lines depending on the standard um of this uh of this cable now typically poe at least the poe power over ethernet capability that most people are familiar with typically poe is actually um is actually only limited to around 30 watts right and that's kind of the older standard but there are some new standards including lt poe plus plus and 802.3 at that actually allow for delivery of up to 90 watts over a single ethernet cable that comes with a massive caveat you'll notice that this cable is actually pretty thick uh it uses uh it's it's well shielded obviously which is great you know when you're kind of doing these longer runs um but the thing that you notice specifically is that it is very thick and part of that i suspect although i have not yet torn into this cable part of that i suspect is that the conductors may be slightly larger than normal so they may be 22 gauge or or even 20 gauge i'm guessing that they're probably 22. but typically ethernet cable that you find that you might buy from let's just say mono price or something like that i am picking on them because they you know they actually do make wonderful cables but you don't if you're not delivering power over that cable you can actually use very thin conductors you can use 24 or 26 or 28 gauge depending on um you know really uh how cheap the cable is and how thin you want it to be but with this you do actually want those conductors to be sized appropriately uh to deliver uh 90 watts of power to the uh to the pd the powered device um on the uh which is which is dishy right um if you don't have that what's going to happen is that this cable is actually going to end up heating uh and it's going to make everything quite a quite a bit more inefficient because the voltage at the end of the cable and this is quite a long cable is going to drop uh and and as that voltage drops you know the power supply on the other end is probably designed for a reasonably wide range but it probably also is efficient in a very specific range of uh of voltage inputs and so um essentially you're going to want to optimize for that range ensure that the voltage uh at the start is very at least as similar as possible to the voltage at the end uh and and that way dishi is powered now the other thing you're going to notice on on dish's cable at both ends is actually this ferrite bead so if you were to open this up what you'd actually see is is pretty much metal um but what this what this does is essentially this acts to remove or reduce the high frequency noise that travels along this line and it basically um dissipates that noise in the form of heat it's not ever going to get significantly hot so you don't have to worry about that but it is a mechanism just to just to ensure that as you know to minimize the the high frequency noise that's traveling along the length of this conductor okay now i want to talk a little bit more about the inside of the enclosure now there are two parts of this enclosure first of all the outer bay which is what i'm calling the area that's exposed a little bit more to the outside elements which houses the elevation assembly uh and uh and motors right that area is is unsealed but this inner area is actually intended to be completely weather sealed um normally your cable glands for your ethernet and uh and motor cables come through these two holes uh this is your gorte your gore vent um and then finally uh although i've removed it in this photo already or in this video already uh there is a uh an o-ring that goes the entire length of this um there's positive retention of the actual uh phased array assembly like the mechanical assembly by these little clips that line the edge of this and so these clips hold the uh hold the assembly against the o-ring that extends around the edge and that's kind of what provides the waterproofing now there is another waterproofing element here which is that this docking sleeve uh basically slides over the mounting bosses that protrude from the back of the phased array assembly and the docking sleeve has these little uh gaskets uh in the kind of at the at the base of the sleeve and those actually made up with the surface of the boss uh on the uh on the phase on the phased array assembly and that basically forms a nice weather tight seal um and so basically there's no way that water can come in through any of these uh uh holes uh for the for the uh bolts that go through the docking sleeve um there's no way that water can enter uh through this uh you know through these two ports for the ethernet and uh and motor and then uh this again this this gore vent really just serves to likely allow moisture to escape from the enclosure but it is unidirectional it doesn't allow moisture to enter the enclosure again and the other purpose that it probably serves is to equalize the pressure so as the temperature of the dish changes or of the phased array assembly or any really any components in this area change you want to be able to equalize um the pressure uh with the outside with the outside error and so this is that's how you would achieve that through this event now you'll notice that there's also a good amount of ribbing here to add some structural integrity but overall this part is is reasonably flexible a lot of the structure a lot of the mechanical rigidity in this design comes from the phased array assembly itself it comes from the metal back plate metal shield of that assembly and of course that that assembly is actually really it's covering material a pcb a circuit board and then that backing that uh that shield that metal shield with those mounting bosses that insert into these uh into these uh docking sleeves um those basically are all sandwiched together with adhesive uh and so essentially they stay they form a very rigid um mechanical assembly and then a lot of the uh that rigidity you know is is uh is kind of provided to this outer enclosure so even though this outer enclosure can can flex somewhat which you may be able to see on the video you may not um you can see kind of a little bit of a little bit of flexure on this uh on this rib down here um that that is uh is not actually a problem from a mechanical perspective this is going to be very very robust to high wind loading uh and likely very robust to impact as well now i just want to take kind of a feel of this material i'm not entirely sure what this is i'm not good at reading plastic part markings but when i scratch it it actually may have a little bit of glass fiber in it um and i would guess that it has maybe just a little bit of glass fiber in it uh to add a little bit of additional structural integrity um it does feel a little bit yeah a little bit scratchier than normal um so yeah i i it's hard to say but i would guess oh those were actually the screws that were holding it together aside from the adhesive right um wow oh this is nuts all right i'm gonna just disconnect that hold on so you guys can see what i'm seeing i'm disconnecting two connectors on the bottom here and look at that that is insane okay so good news is that i likely have not damaged this the bad news is that this is just insane wow okay so let's talk about this here's what we're looking at um we're looking at the inside of dishy here um now the interesting thing about this what they've done um it looks like they have uh you know kind of a like what almost looks like an a fiberglass or or like fr4 substrate right that this thing that this whole assembly is just glued together so there's a there's a um this outer metal shell um the uh outer metal shell is is going over is basically adhered somehow and again i'm gonna go ahead and put my money on glue um it's adhered somehow to this um kind of this like substrate which it either like i said either feels like a fiberglass or um or uh or something similar right and and basically everything on this is housed within the whole thing is just housed within this so this is one single module this is the entire brains of of dishy um and look how thin it is i can't even i can't even show this on my other camera but look how thin that is that's insane so okay let's take a look at this so what we have here are some markings we've got a um if i hold this up to the camera a little bit so everybody can see um what we have got are uh the two connectors j13 appears to be the ethernet connector um so that's there and then the other one appears to be for the motor um and uh for the motor assembly that handles the the elevation uh uh function so the other thing that i'm seeing on here is kind of this um serial number um basically this uh you know you see a serial number you've got what the pcba revision this is revision a of this board so this is actually pretty new new design um and uh and there's also some ground tx and rx lines um so that likely kind of indicates that there's a uh that kind of indicates to me that there's a uh a serial connection that they can use maybe to debug the board um and and a resistor that can be populated um so there's one that a resistor r14 that is not in fact populated uh and and there's j14 which is a connector that we we really have no idea what's on there but it's probably fair to assume that that's jtag or or something like that that's necessary to talk to um the um uh talk to the the chips that are running on this thing now the other thing that's really interesting here is that there's a uh an sma connection on here um and that sma connection i'm guessing they use that for calibration at the factory um but it uh you know it isn't connected to anything within this within this uh within this final design at least at least how we see it um so i i would be curious about that uh kind of these good sturdy mounting bot uh you know mounting bosses uh that that allow you to adhere to the frame like i said it doesn't look like i've really done any damage um to the outer edge of this right like maybe a little bit of scratching on the pcb but i'm guessing that there's a pretty wide keep out area around the outside so that you don't accidentally um damage the uh the the uh you know the device during disassembly um it's not fully sealed right like i can see fr4 pcb like i can see i can see pcb and like solder mask and everything underneath underneath this um so it's probably safe to assume that you know that it's there what's amazing to me is how well integrated this whole thing is and i really can't tell like the thing i mean it is it is hard to describe how thin this is it is just wafer thin this is this is dishy this is the whole thing this is the brains right here you could literally take you can literally take this and put it on your own base and you know you probably have to connect some motors so that you know you have motors right so that you can do so that can handle the elevation it's probably doing some internal checking to make sure that everything's good but you could design realistically your own base for dishy um pretty easily and i'm guessing that that is in fact what some people may choose to do but i am just astounded at how thin this is um and it really does appear like this outer shell it appears that this outer shell is in fact bonded um to kind of whatever this underlying substrate is and yeah there's just not there's not much to say about it i mean it's just gorgeous i guess the question is is can we go any further you know that's always the question can we go further i don't want to damage this that's what i will say is i'm really not interested in doing going so far that i that i start to damage it but i am curious what's under here and i i suspect that this whole thing that these bosses don't need to be removed or anything like that i suspect that this whole thing especially since there are no marks indicating that they have been yeah looks like they're maybe welded on or not no but yeah i i suspect that the only way to get through this is to go ahead and try maybe i'll just try running a blade around the outside just for a second to just see yeah there's another layer of adhesive um but i have no idea what the depth of it is right so i can't say like yeah okay this will just stop right here everything's fine um but there is another layer of adhesive here and i suspect that if this layer of adhesive were gone um you know around each one of these you know you might be able to get underneath and take a look at the at the the pcb that's underneath this which i think is where a lot of the magic is happening in this design and the question is is we've gone you know we've gone this far how much further are we willing to go well it feels like this is not a thick layer of adhesive it feels like it really just goes on each one of these thin fins so i suspect that if i cut the adhesive associated with each one of these little fins that comes out that this thing may just want to release itself and that would be okay with me because then i could show you what's underneath it so i'm just to be totally clear here's what i'm doing here i'm just going a half round yeah man i'm just going around and uh and checking this out yeah yeah this is definitely releasing this um this paint panel i'm really not looking forward to trying to re-glue this but you know there are worse things to have happen and i can probably find maybe i can find a material that will approximate the original you know that they used for the adhesive really trying not to damage the underlying board here i'm guessing again i'm guessing there are no traces or anything like that that are near here you know they this would have to be an absolutely massive pcb for that to be the case and also like yeah the substrate is probably pretty sensitive or at least what they're using is the substrate for the antenna is probably pretty sensitive but it's probably not that sensitive you know what i mean so my hope is that this thing will just you know yield its secrets mind blowing it's a great design i mean it is really impressive what they've managed to do i think um you know what i'm seeing is that a lot of the innovation i mean there's innovation all across the board in this design right but like a huge amount of innovation in the design of the user terminal itself right um user terminal being dishy um and i think you know you would need to get the cost down you would need to really think about how to mass produce these things um and and also like there it is it is incredibly sophisticated as a device right like it is an incredibly sophisticated device and so i do see why you know why this is so complex i don't think it's i don't think starlink is trying to be you know pains in the ass necessarily to try to protect their ip by making this as seal as it is i think there's really good rf reasons for having a massive shield over the whole back of it right like really good rf raisins for having that shield um but i also suspect that like the other side of things is just like how is piloting the manufacturability of these like how easy can we make this to manufacture how can we reduce the cost um enough that we can make you know tens of thousands of these quickly um in a way that will end up being reliable right and that's the other side of things is that it does need to be reliable you can't just make like you know i might be able to cook something with enough time i might be able to cook something uh up you know up like this um at least from the manufacturing standpoint maybe not the technical standpoint but um but at the same time making now you now go make 10 000 of them right like go make 10 000 of them tomorrow and this is just incredible like the it is a lot of work to go through around here and just kind of remove all the adhesive um i'm hoping that they really just have it on these fins so that i can kind of just come you know remove it that way and just i should probably shouldn't be putting any pressure on the existing stuff but yeah i suspect i'm hoping they'll just have it on these fins and then i can just peel this thing off now i want to take a second to also talk about the shield and uh one thing you'll notice about this is that it does not look like uh the uh the video you've uh you may have seen of me taking this apart and removing the shield from the pcb and the reason for that is because this is not designed to be disassembled now there is in fact a uh a tremendous amount of adhesive on the bottom of this in fact there's what appears to be a vhb a 3m vhb like adhesive very high bond adhesive that lines each of these ribs and so these ribs actually um you know make contact uh where you know there's an adhesive that's bonded to the ribs and then the other side of that adhesive is actually bonded to the pcb um that is uh on the other side of this uh on the other side of the shield now this is really really thick um i'm gonna go ahead and guess uh steel and let's go ahead and just take a measurement of that really quickly so you can gauge that actually i'm going to take that back i think it's aluminum uh but let's find a good spot here yeah so it's 1.3 millimeter thick uh aluminum uh and there's there are not very many features on it um the only one to be really aware of are are these mounting bosses um and uh and also this hole for the uh what i'm assuming is a calibration uh sma connector um really anything else is just for location so there's this whole right for location but but that's about it um it is a very simple design now on the other side of it an interesting thing that i've noticed whoops um is that uh you know we see several of these um kind of blue dots um and these are actually this is actually a thermally uh conductive material that i believe is just applied uh applied by a machine and essentially it forms to whatever surface it mates to on both sides so it's a great way of conducting heat from the pcb into the metal shield now the other thing that you can see now is is this 3m vhb adhesive that's been applied and again this went the entire length of these ribs very difficult to remove and you can see why this uh why this tear down became destructive uh it wasn't possible to actually do that without bending the board damaging it etc this is really not designed to be taken apart and of course applying any type of solvent in here it really is so close to the board that it would have likely damaged the board and honestly uh you know i wasn't really interested in having those chem having to deal with those chemicals for the rest of the video so uh one little thing that i'll call one nice little detail that i'll call out is that it looks like um either uh some sort of mechanical press or or maybe even a laser ablative technique was used to kind of rough the area where each of these where each of these uh thermally conductive blobs was placed and i'm guessing that that improves the thermal conductivity um and ensures that this blob actually adheres to the smooth surface of the material which it might otherwise not uh there is one more feature that's actually kind of interesting which is that toward the edge here we see what looks like a it's a metallic foam and it makes contact i'm guessing uh with kind of to provide a shield and it appears to be cor it's location appears to correspond to the location of the gps receiver and my guess for the reasoning there is that the gps receiver may have an oscillator uh that is at a that kind of um that oscillates at a different frequency than the clock that's being distributed around the board and so they may wish to contain um that oscillation or that you know any any emissions to that specific area um and so i'm guessing that that's why they have that that um metallic foam right so that metallic foam is going to be conductive and it'll kind of ensure that that um that that uh area remains uh isolated from an emi perspective okay this is the moment we've been waiting for this is the front of the dishy phased array assembly now this is the sky facing side so what you're seeing here are the individual patch antennas that are responsible for forming the phased array so each one of these elements is an individual or is is part of a couple of elements that comprise a single antenna that's capable of transmitting and receiving signals now all of these antennas all these antenna elements essentially combine into a single uh antenna that's capable of of directing its beam uh so it's capable of beam steering both in its azimuth so uh to the kind of the you know pan right and also in its elevation so to tilt um and uh and what's remarkable about this board just right off the bat is how massive it is um so if i'm measuring a lot of tape measure here this board is actually uh you know at its at its smallest point it is uh about 50 centimeters across uh that's uh 19 and three quarters inches for those of us in the us um and at its kind of its largest uh point it is 21 and a half inches and 54 and a half centimeters now just massive as a pcb that's the first thing that you're struck by is how large this is and it is one of the larger pcbs that i've seen in a in a piece of consumer electronics right um you might see something like this that's this size in a server uh or or you know in in in kind of more professional or industrial great electronics but it's very rare to see something of this complexity in a consumer product um now what you're seeing here uh like i said these individual antenna elements um you also have this grid in the background and this grid is kind of a ground plane right so this is just uh it represents ground um and then uh as i kind of go further into the video i'll also explain what this hexagonal mesh is that's coming up in places as you can tell i caused some damage to this board uh to disassemble it and it's unfortunate but it is actually worth the damage to show you just how beautiful this is it's a massive accomplishment for the starling team now flipping this over i'll show you the other side and orient it appropriately toward the top this is the back of the phased array assembly uh going uh just to kind of give you a lay of the land here i'm just gonna go around each uh each part of this and kind of explain what we're looking at you know by area so these connectors are the ones that are referenced earlier these are the ones that are exposed through the shield on the back next over uh to the right here clockwise you have uh the poe power over ethernet magnetics so a set of transformers that are used for the power over ethernet functionality and then you have the power supply and i'm guessing that this may be a pre-regulation supply that essentially provides power at a reduced voltage to other other devices on the board and it also probably handles um power over ethernet negotiation so that's kind of the the ability of a power over ethernet the technical term as pd or powered device to negotiate what voltage what power um it's going to consume from the switch or or from the poe injector that it's attached to so continuing counter clock clockwise what we see is we see the application processor and its related components so this is the application processor this is the brains this runs the saw space links primary software package um it has two ram chips that are associated with it and it also has an emmc flash storage device which contains dishes file system and i'll go into detail about those a little bit later but as we continue clockwise uh we see that we have a little bit of uh another power supply and actually this is the first of many power supplies that actually are oriented uh or are labeled and then placed counterclockwise on the board i'm going clockwise i know it's a controversial decision um but these power supplies are actually providing power to uh uh internal components the components on the on the that are more toward the center of the board that have uh that kind of are on the rf side of the functionality now as we continue uh counterclockwise we see a little area that's actually designated gps uh and this contains a uh gps receiver chip um and i'll dig into that a little bit more as well as a two megabit or sorry two megabyte uh flash uh that presumably holds some additional code or or potentially uh there are other data that's relevant to this transceiver now interestingly enough this transceiver can also be used as a processor it has its own arm processor built into it and and space link may be using that or skylink sorry starlink maybe maybe using that and we'll talk about that in a little bit uh we see some more power supplies around the outside here um and and really that's it on the on the tour of the outer edge right these are all power supplies i believe that these two uh chips up here in this upper left hand corner of the board um are actually uh potentially i haven't yet looked them up but just given their proximity to this connector which is the connector for the motors uh that handle the elevation function my guess is that these are h-bridge chips um so motor drivers uh uh for those motors so let's continue um working from the center outward there's one really interesting uh you know a lot of this board is self-similar right there are a lot of components that are that are um replicated and a lot of elements in the design that are replicated uh multiple times on the board but one element that's very different is that at the center there was a little shielded area which i have cut through there's a little shielded area that was labeled clock caddy and i believe what this is is i believe that this is a a clock distribution amplifier so essentially there's a one of the things that you can spot in here which i will show you in a little bit more detail is a 60 megahertz uh crystal oscillator and then i believe that this ic which appears to be a custom chip it's an st part but it is sd microelectronics part but my guess is that this is a custom chip for starlink this component i believe is an amplifier that actually distributes this uniform clock out from the center of the board to all the components throughout the center that rely on having a shared clock so yeah as we start to dig into this um i think that we'll go through each item and we can we'll talk about the individual chips and we'll also kind of talk about the functionality and kind of and then finally a little bit about what i believe the the topology or the architecture of this uh board is potentially through a block diagram so that'll be the next major thing now i want to take a moment to talk about one of the most interesting elements of this design which is the rf portion it is also unfortunately one of the areas that i am least qualified to talk about as i said at the introduction to this video rf is magic and only magicians really understand its secrets um but what i will say is that the topology of this system is actually very interesting um so there is a uh there's a lot of self-similarity on this board right it's a it's a phased array there are many many many many elements and it makes sense that you would want to potentially split this problem down into smaller blocks that you can then replicate on the board and i believe that that is the approach that starlink has taken in the design of this array so um what i've noticed overall is that there are these blocks that are comprised of kind of these four sorry eight smaller ics all of which are the same part number as well as as this larger ic here now the interesting thing about this is that neither of these components are are publicly available they appear to be custom parts from st and that doesn't actually entirely surprised me uh spacex's downlink frequency is 37.5 to 42.5 gigahertz and their uplink frequency is 47.2 to 50.2 gigahertz or 50.4 to 52.4 gigahertz and that uh you know kind of at this point you're starting to reach into that microwave magic uh section of things and so you could see why there might be some proprietary ip development now i would uh i would say that generally in in a phased array you usually have an element that acts as a phase shifter right so as you um you know as you shift the signal um the signals phase you're basically able to use that that uh you know delay the signal as it leaves the device or as it or or read the delay as it's coming into the device to understand um how uh you know basically to either understand and reject noise or to shape a beam and uh and and mitigate noise on the trans on the as you're transmitting now or i guess when i say shape of bm i mean shape a wave front right or super pose a wave front now the uh interesting thing about this i guess aside from that is that when you look at this when you look at this individual block you can see a little bit of marking that's on the board so this marking includes two markings rfe data and rffe clock so rffe stands for rf front end interface and it's actually a mippy standard midi is a standards organization they produce these different standards uh they're pretty much used in uh almost everything these days anything that has a display for example the mippy dsi display uh serial interface uh or mipi csi uh camera serial interface standards are are used very frequently in for example mobile phones but the mipi rffe are a front-end interface standard describes a two-wire control bus that operates at up to 56 megahertz now it's also it's a leader and follower bus uh there are up to four leaders uh that are are supported per bus and uh and i think it's a total of something like 60-ish followers um so it might make sense that the application processor in this design is actually acting as a as a leader uh and the rest of these devices on this board are just followers and there are some instead several leader channels coming out of that application processor um but that's just kind of a guess it's really difficult to tell and and pulling components on the off the board for example is not really going to tell us much now if i was had a lot of time i would probably go around and probe and actually try to discover which of these devices are chained together on the same rffe data or rffv clock lines but it's it's really again it's it's very uh it's very difficult to tell one thing that i i will say almost for certain is that this clock that's in the center of the board um the thing that we talked about earlier that's in its little clock caddy uh is distributing a a clock i would imagine a low frequency clock and that's potentially um what this uh basically i would say like a low frequency clock marked for example here low clock uh is being distributed to each one of these devices so that they can synchronize their operations which would be really critical for for a design like this where you're distributing functionality across uh many different ics uh and and synchronization it has to be very very tight now the rf front end of a system is the ant is pretty much considered to be the antenna input through the mixer stage um what i suspect is that these these are actually individual front ends that are maybe interacting with multiple um either switches or or uh or or phase shifters and maybe it's capable of just doing both inside this um but i suspect that essentially each one of these blocks operates as a as a component of the overall uh phase shifting array and basically we're able to uh form the beam by having the application processor address each of these individual uh design blocks that's my suspicion now i don't know that that's entirely correct among the other features that i can kind of point out here um there's a there's a lot of via stitching that's kind of taking place coming out of this bga so it's fair probably to assume that there's rf that there is an rf component uh in this bga now very few supporting components like very few passives that are necessary to support it at least on the outside of the board not saying that there is nothing embedded in the board itself although that's pretty rare um and i would say that uh it's probably fair to assume that each one of these is some sort of rf switch or or maybe something more complex like a more complex element like actually something that's capable of doing the phase shifting internally um but it does look like each one of these is individually supplied uh uh or fed i guess by this this larger st part here so i would say that it's fair to assume likely that the 79 uh of these design blocks so a total of 632 of these ics and presumably 632 elements on the front of the board i would assume that each of those elements could be individually driven um and and may be able to operate in as as both transmit and receive uh in some capacity so that's about all i can really say about the rf side of the board but arguably it is one of the more interesting elements of this design and i'd love if somebody would chime in uh to give me kind of some feedback and maybe provide a little bit more information as to as to the as to the overall topology of this design it's absolutely fascinating now i do want to take a second here and talk about the actual stack up of materials that is laminated to the pcba in the phased array assembly now the if you're just to put us in physical context here if you're looking at this what you're seeing uh is is basically this this hexagonal array which is basically acts as a standoff to i would assume assure a fixed distance from these elements that are uh are on this next plane but this hexagonal array actually each hexagon corresponds to a single element on the face of the pcba and basically each of these each of these little elements here is laminated it's a little piece of copper that's laminated to the other side of this very very thin piece of fiberglass that it itself is laminated to the other side of this hexagonal mesh now what's really unclear to me is exactly how this stack up works right okay so i want to take a second now to talk about the stack up of materials uh between the pcb the surface of the pcb and uh and the outer surface of dishy so let's go ahead and do that so here's the stack up basically let's start let's start here we'll start we'll start at the pcb itself um so the pcb is kind of this uh this uh fr4 or just pcb material and we'll go ahead and fill that in so that you can see and of course on the surface of this uh pcb on the outer surface of this pcb or the sky facing surface there are a number of kind of antenna elements which are made out of copper um so these uh these copper antenna elements basically are each um each tied to uh the board and then and then between uh between each of these elements there's kind of a rectangular grid which is likely i believe ground plane now the next layer above this and what's bonded almost directly to the board is this hexagonal mesh and the mesh i'm going to draw it a little bit kind of hovering above the surface but this mesh actually has a very a fixed thickness and uh and it goes you know it basically goes ahead and it goes down over the elements um below on the onto the pcb so it actually gets bound directly to the pcb so essentially uh yeah essentially all of this is just bound directly to the surface of the pcb right uh and the the the spaces in that mesh the spaces in that hexagonal mesh are actually what uh are actually uh left uh filled by these by these antenna elements now the next layer that is uh is bound here is actually a another kind of uh let's just call it a a fiberglass layer right and the fiberglass layer is bound to the other side of this hexagonal mesh and it's a very thin layer and then on the on the other side of that fiberglass layer so so on on this side of the fiberglass layer uh we actually have a a series of copper elements that correspond and i believe that they're passive antenna elements but they correspond their positions correspond to the active antenna elements that are on the pcb below them now above this there's yet another uh spacing mesh and it's a another hexagonal mesh right which i'm just going to draw here and i'm going to just kind of fill that in it's not the prettiest thing in the world but it will work yeah excellent so this hexagonal mesh also uh kind of works as uh in the same way that the ones below did uh it's going to fit down and be bonded to uh the uh kind of fiberglass substrate that this second layer of um of uh passive uh antenna elements is sitting on and it basically provides a spacer between uh between these uh active and tele antenna elements kind of an air gap in each uh opening in the mesh um and then it basically provides a spacer for the next uh layer which is another layer of kind of a um for lack of a better word a i think it's i think it's a fiberglass substrate that the outer dish surface material whatever that is bound to is actually uh or bonded to is actually bonded too so you've got this uh substrate this fiberglass substrate uh and then i believe you have one more layer above it and i'll make that just slightly lighter um and that one more layer is the actual outer uh surface of dishy of the front of of the sky facing side of dishy so it's actually a very um as far as i can tell it's actually a very complex stack up um and especially since you have to do kind of control the impedance of each of these layers um and they have to be kind of like rf transparent right and so they're probably doing a lot of calculation to figure out exactly how um how to best design the stack up so that there's not too uh too much loss inserted by this uh by this material that's stacked over the over the antenna elements if you keep going down i i've gone ahead and i've actually cut away a little bit of this so i've removed the hexagonal mesh you can see just the fiberglass and you can see that it's kind of glued to this another layer of hexagonal um a hexagonal mesh which is a plastic layer and then finally it hits another layer of fiberglass and then of course the other side this is the the face of of dishy right um so i i'm not entirely certain how this works from an rf perspective or what each thing is but i would imagine that each of these forms a second part of the antenna element or maybe a second element of that specific antenna and and basically even though it's not necessarily directly electrically coupled it's probably coupled in some intricately complex rf way that i do not understand and then essentially i would imagine that each of these layers is impedance controlled um and uh and is suitable for kind of transmission of of rf but that's really about all the insight that i can offer there i just thought that the stack up is particularly interesting uh especially these little copper disks that are laminated on they do all appear to be uh going the same direction they follow the same orientation they don't appear to shift angle at all over the over the um uh over the entire panel so i'm not entirely sure how they would interact with the elements underneath uh but yeah it is a very interesting uh uh design uh either nonetheless all right that brings our tear down to an end thank you so much for joining me today if you did enjoy this video please take a second to like and subscribe i'd really like to build up the follower base a little bit so i can kind of find some justification for creating more content like this um and also if you happen to be a starlink employee and you enjoyed this teardown and you would like to help me get access uh or get some replacement equipment that would be really appreciated i would love to actually test out the service uh and i clearly i i didn't get a chance to uh as this went a little bit further than i was intending it to um but i'm glad that we did it i'm glad that we got to share with everybody and yeah until next time thanks a lot youtube

Channel: Ken Keiter

Views: 401,742

Keywords: starlink, teardown, reverse-engineering, hardware, spacex, elon musk, dishy, satellite, electrical engineering, space, internet, ASICs, GNSS

Id: iOmdQnIlnRo

Length: 55min 53sec (3353 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Inevitable_Toe5097]

I hope this ends the silly debate about it containing a heater.

[u/Dyslexic_Engineer88]

It's absolutely insane they can sell this for $500, Kymeta has been working on this stuff for a decade.

This is an extremely impressive piece of Electrical Engineering.

[u/cocksure845]

Appreciate this bold tear-down video. One respectful correction: the Starlink satellites, being deployed 60 per SpaceX launch are not cube sats.

[u/jacky4566]

With regard to the GPS/GNSS.
I highly doubt that IC is doing any co-processing of the signals. Its just doing its job Geo-locating. It has an ARM processor do its job.

Flash chips are very commonly paired with receivers separately for cost and size. 8 up to 64Mbit chips are used with uBlox systems. They allow Firmware upgrades and store orbital information for a fast, more accurate fix.

Since we have seen people move the dishes several kilometers and maintain service I suspect geo locking is being done at the "cell" or per satellite and not the modem. It would make the most sense since doing it at the modem would allow ground based attacks on the geo-locking. But i could be wrong and they are using encrypted comms between GNSS and the main brain.

[u/KrisKringleson]

Would really love /u/TheSignalPath taking a look at the RF side of things on this.

[u/cocksure845]

FYI; In last night’s Starlink launch coverage, intrepid host Kate Tice had a ~ 20 second segment showing a map of Minnesota- and how Starlink coverage was effective/was not effective based on terrestrial location down to a couple cities. The swath of service coverage was bigger than I imagined.

[u/Roadhog2k5]

Wow! What a great teardown and in depth analysis! Thanks

[u/DamnUsernameTaken68]

If they really used FR4 for the base PCB that would cut the cost by a huge amount. It should be possible despite going against conventional wisdom.

The top reflector kinda looks like it might be a Rogers variant which is molded into shape. That would be the layer where you'd want the low loss material but would likely be more expensive than the base PCB.

[u/jurc11]

GPS receiver confirmed. I feel, not for the first time, that sooooomebody kinda predicted that. Can't remember who, though!