I really liked the structure of the interview and the type of questions.
All questions were really relevant and the order they were built up, worked very well!
Cool to hear that he started the company with fellow students.
Some questions unanswered
1. How did they come up with the name, and how long did it actually take them to come up with this name My guess is that Siglent comes from Signal and Intelligent.
But still would be nice to hear other alternatives that made the first rounds before they decided on the final name. Apparently the name took really off, as the sales increased after they moved from an OEM business model to a branded business model.
2. Easter eggs in Siglent products. Maybe the CEO put in some easter eggs himself in the first model.
Well, at least they had 2,5 years to add one in And maybe even today there are some easter eggs left in the newer products.
3. Financing. How they pulled this together in the very early days of the factory.
Did they go to several banks for getting a business loan. Insight on the process back then, and maybe also some insights on the business climate in China today. Do they have incubators in China today? Is it as easy as in the US today or at least similar? Silicon valley spirit, Stealth phase approach, etc.
4. Siglent's take on High-Level-Synthesis and an "All-in-C" based design flow, where the hardware logic is not written in VHDL by hardware engineers, but developed by software engineers, who synthesize the high-level source code into RTL.
5. Siglent's take on Xilinx Zynq 7000 series (inspired by GW-Instek in Taiwan).
6. Engineering education in China. If the amount of engineering students is increasing. Popular engineering schools. Competition between universities in research papers. In Europe some countries are facing challenges as number of engineering students is declining: "Everybody likes an iPhone, but nobody likes to make one".
7. Factory tour in Siglent. Would be cool if this can be organized. To get a glimpse of how scopes are put together. There is a guy on Internet who does lots of these factory tours for Android tablet devices (armdevices.net). Still AFAIK I have not seen a factory tour of a Chinese scope factory.
8. Where does Siglent buy their relative silent fans? Apparently they know, and maybe if they reveal, someone can pass the address on to Rigol And Where does Siglent buy the factory-remove screen protectors? Rigol should have them on their screens as well
9. Siglent's view on having a video output connector on test equipment. Why not have an HDMI connector on the oscilloscope and the spectrum analyzer. Or both VGA and HDMI to support older video projectors in the class room.
10. Licensing. Whether Siglent licenses some SW libraries and IP from other companies (algorithms, RTL IP blocks, patents on signal processing, interleaving methods, etc.) in their products?
11. Spectrum analyzer. Do they sell them in Europe? I could not find on their website.
Maybe these questions can be answered in a follow-up interview, or can be addressed by email exchange between the Australian interviewer (aka Dave) and the Chinese CEO (aka Yolo)
One more question to my earlier posted list:
12. The first oscilloscope that they worked on in the initial days. What hardware architecture did they use? Details on the FPGA, ADC, etc. What reference designs did they use (FPGA, analog front-end)?
How did they design the analog front-end in the first place? Are their books available with examples? =)
Which design tools did they use for the PCB (PCB schematic, PCB layout)? Which design tools did they use for the software (FPGA design tools, MCU design tools, RTOS tools). Which design tools did they use for the housing (CAD tools)? All this software is very expensive, so maybe they did this on the university campus, in order to make use of student licenses? In case they did not do everything internal, and outsourced, they could give some more details on the type of partners which they worked with. Even if they were good at the hardware and the software, engineers typically are not experts in CAD tools to make housing, and to make everything fit nicely together. What was the size of their first production run? And last but not least, what was actually the model number of their very first oscilloscope? Are the specs and pictures still available? Did that one run the proprietary RTOS which they were talking about? Which RTOS?
All this information is from 2002, so it should not be sensitive anymore. It can be really educating for other startup newbies and electronic students. Siglent most likely will not have an issue with sharing some more info on this front, as it seems that Siglent is very pro electronic engineering education, given that their company mission is to make test equipment affordable for students and beginners. Moreover it will be free marketing for their company indirectly. Maybe the CEO, should write a book, that includes pictures from the early days, with the fancy title "The making of Siglent" providing insights from the early days - how a small Chinese startup has grown out to one of the top 3 Chinese test equipment manufacturers"