Quote from: MrTeal on October 31, 2012, 04:47:38 PM

I thought Tom has repeatedly said that he isn't assembling the bASIC units himself. He's going to get them from the assembly house, flash and test them, the package them for shipping. Managing inventories should be much simpler than for BFL.

If I had to guess, I'd say his margins are likely to be much lower than BFL's, but that's not really much of a concern for us as customers. If true it might come into play more in half a year when ASIC vendors start slashing the price of their units to keep them moving.

Yup, this is what I read when I was deciding who to pre-order with in mid October, everything except firmware loading and final testing is outsourced, which will reduce his margins but make things much easier for him to manage compared to his FPGA products:

Quote from: cablepair on October 02, 2012, 11:04:10 AM

What has changed?

(a) The ModMiner quad goes through a lot of steps that take time
- The PCB boards are fabricated in one place in china
- The FPGA Chips are purchased from another place
- Everything is shipped to me and then
- Everything is shipped to the assembly house
- I purchase some final parts and have them shipped here
- Everything gets nearly assembled and shipped here
- I put them together and test them, package them up myself and ship them out myself
- All while trying to handle support issues, customer service and the logistics of the whole thing

So with the bASIC I decided to streamline a lot of these things, for one I have a very good relationship with the place that assembles the ModMinerQuad and they have taken over a lot more responsibility with this project:
- Their engineers are designing the final production board
- The PCB's will be fabricated by them
- The Boards will be assembled by them to completion

Then final boards will be shipped to me

And here is where I have made another change and upgraded my operation:

I have also leased a 2500 square foot office space / store front which I am in the process of moving into and will be hiring full time employees to help when the bASIC units ship out, their duties will include opening up boxes from the assembly house - loading firmware - testing for 24 hours - boxing them back up and shipping them out to customers.

I was going to wait and announce this later this week but now seems like a fitting time:

If anyone lives in the Central/Northern NY area (has experience enough and time to do this job efficiently/effectively) and would like to apply for a job please call me any time to arrange an appointment (seriously)

when the bASIC units come in from the assembly house you will get a lot of overtime - we will probably need about 5 people working 8-12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Quote from: LiteBit on October 31, 2012, 12:56:27 PM

As of yesterday 10.30.2012: (from BFL_Josh on BFL Forums)

Quote

With regards to bASIC, given the fact that Tom has shown basically nothing, no renders, no prototype, not even any power estimates, it seems exceedingly unlikely he will ship before us. I'm not saying it's impossible of course, but there are many "fishy" things about the bASIC offering. Of course, the whole power issue, which Tom refuses to acknowledge is one of the biggest clues that things are not right in the bASIC world. If he were as far along as he implies, he would at least have a fairly reasonable and accurate power estimate, but his little "slip" of less than 100w for 54 GH/s is pretty unrealistic at 90nm, especially if it's Cell ASIC or something similar. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible, maybe Tom has come up with major surprise and be able to ship on his currently stated timeline, but it seems unlikely at this point.

I think that BFL_Josh's statement is not accurate in that particular paragraph I left quoted. Tom claimed to have a prototype using Cell ASIC from a university wafer run before even announcing his offering, but made no statements about his final ASICs other than being on a 90nm process:

Quote from: cablepair on September 03, 2012, 10:57:00 PM

anyways here are some more specific details for those who are interested on how BTCFPGA produced our first 4th gen prototype

Like the ModMiner quad I leased the design from someone else. Also like the ModMiner quad this project is being partially funded by lenders in the Bitcointalk lending syndicate. We contracted a well known overseas company to provide us with a SHA256 hashing core that could be applied to Bitcoin mining, this company is one of the top design firms in the world when it comes to SHA256 IP cores. We leased what is called an RTL design which allows us to use any target ASIC process technology of our choice, once we had the core design we spent some money to have some made (this took some time) and turned those over to the hardware development team. We have two guys which I have no problem admitting are much smarter than I am who have come up with a working development board using multiple instances of the hashing core I indicated above. They have a very very (did I mention very?) primitive hacked together mining program that is being used to test, testing has been going on for about 2 weeks now with positive enough results that encouraged me to go public with our next generation of Bitcoin mining product. The hardware guys are still working on finalizing the pcb board design and there is a lot of firmware and software work that needs to be completed.

A lot of people are asking about specific details about the chips and also about power usage, and the only reason I am at all reluctant to answer these questions is because I dont want to say something now and be wrong about or have it change.

Quote from: cablepair on September 04, 2012, 04:25:06 PM

These would be considered Cell Based ASIC

I am not going into specific details about certain aspects of the prototype asics / mining unit because some of this may change from prototype to production

Please note I do not claim to be the technical mind behind all of this, this protoype has been achieved through leases, and contractors

the SHA256 hashing core was (not designed by me) it was leased through a overseas design firm

the prototype asics themselves were made in a multi project wafer run program through a university

we are still shopping around for a long term manufacturer of these asics

the mining units will be assembled at the same place that assembles the modminer quad.

BTCFPGA went with an IP design, made some prototype chips in a university run, hacked together a prototype, then outsourced the whole thing to fabricate and assemble.