Re: What are the chances Bfl. Basic. Avalon. Etc use the same gear?
I wasn't exactly comparing them, as BFL does not make chips. They sort of implied they do but now they claim they weren't referring to the chips. They admit their chips are made in Asia. Taiwan if I'm not mistaken and that's where most of them are. You can probably count the number of high end and/or custom chip manufacturing plants in the world on 2 hands. It's just that they sell to one company that sells to another that sells to another that sells to BFL. The same goes for Marvell and Phision and SiS and even Samsung for example. I think maybe Nvidia owns their own chip fab plant but I wouldn't be surprised if they actually didn't.
Maybe the 2nd gen ASIC's will be "more" custom then these first gen.
You typically don't have another generation unless you screw up. That's the point of ASICs. You hard wire everything within, create the masks and manufacturer processes and then you have incredibly complex chips that have a sizable upfront cost but very low production cost. Contrary to what a lot of people thing you can design ASICs to accept some parameters, which makes them in a way re-programmable (this is bounded by what you design into them though). It's also quite popular to include in the ASIC a processor like an Arm8 or something. (I don't think BFL is doing this based upon looking over the layout they released a couple weeks back).
Not so much difficult. Expense largely in size of die and count of layers. Many runs of small size that use netlist can share common layers and only etch custom code in one layer.
Mask much simpler this way. I do not think any of current makers have sales to do any method other than this.
This is most common of ways of making ASIC from FPGA prototype. I do not think there has been enough time to create four or five layer mask just for mining bitcoins. Is too expensive in start up costs to go that way.
Could be wrong. It happen once before.
