Re: Swedish ASIC miner company kncminer.com

$800k for a 28nm full-mask set? This is an amazing offer, at which foundry will I get it that cheap? Wink

Get an itemized quote, do you think you pay the full $2MM up front? If you do, let me know I will gladly negotiate for you next time for 10%. that is the payment you will be making PRIOR to your mask. There are other payments, but you seem to have an inkling of what you are talking about so you know that, don't you?
That I do not believe KnC is producing a fully designed asic should be obvious by now.

That only works if the foundry is convinced that you are worthy of credit. Normally this is not the case for start-ups and SMEs in this price category. For them it is cash in advance or no tape-out. Yes, I know what I'm talking about, it's hard to deal directly with companies like GF or TSMC if your are only a small customer.

I doubt that KnC or OrSOC is seen as a big customer for this project, because they probably will not order more than 50 wafers in the first year (which would be already about 3 PH). 1000 wafers a year would be a big customer. Why should a foundry take any risk for a bitcoin mining ASIC?
So I think they most likely have to pay the complete $1.5M to $2M in advance of the tape-out. And because they said tape-out done "some time ago", they probably paid it also some time ago.

From the commercial point of view I see no reason why KnC should not be able to produce a fully designed 28nm ASIC. They collected enough money by pre-orders to pay the complete 3rd party NREs in advance. But it should be clear, that if they are on track as they claimed, a great deal of the pre-order money isn't in their hands any more.

You are very close to the same point I am making but design is probably 300-400k of the foundry's quote and they say they did all the design themselves (another reason to be skeptical given their foundry did not make them join a shuttle run). 1. Why go to 28nm as no one will give you space unless they see a long term relationship and believe in your market? We believe in this market, I am not sure a salesman would want to pitch it with enthusiasm to his boss though. 2. This company just started doing this 3 months ago. You really think in three months they are taping out a 28nm? Add to this, they just raised the money a month ago. 3. They do background checks before you even get anywhere near this point and 3 months ago, KnC was an idea to "make lots of money". It does not make sense they have taped at 28nm.
4. My guess, which people have posted that it is not true, is they are going with eAsic.

Yes, I'm not that far away, but do not agree with all of your points:

1. OrSOC and KnC need a channel partner of one of the two 28nm foundries to get access at all. eASIC would be a choice (also for a standard cell ASIC!), eSilicon or GUC are others. There are many and they love to take your money for that kind of projects. In this way there is no background check by the foundry required.

2. From my own experience I know that not all 28nm "giga" fabs running currently at there capacity limit. If you bring the money (as cash in advance Wink

) through an accepted channel partner they will do a tape-out for you. They will for sure make you not the best price for masks and wafers, but they will do it, just to get workload for their fabs.

3. Physical implementation and sign-off of a >100mm2 28nm die in about 6 weeks (because mid of June they didn't even have the foundry finally selected and they did tape-out "some time ago") is really a challenge, but not completely impossible. The related risk to fail for such a turbo implementation is huge. I hope they had a really experienced layout team for this job, which already did some tape-out in the concrete 28nm node.

eASIC is GF, Europe.
Altera (my guess) is TSMC, Taiwan, Asia.

ORSoC has a working relationship with both, both do standard cell and take the RTL code. I guess they just had to find the right balance between cost and delivery time. Since Asia won, that very much means they didn't choose eASIC. And they're not dealing with the foundry directly either (hoping they wouldn't take the risk of dealing with a non established partner which would really risk screwing up their timetable).

Also, don't forget they promised a September delivery, NOT a 1st of September delivery. That's 4 weeks to play with.

As far as I know, Altera offers FPGA-Hardcopy only. KnC said several times that they are doing definitely a standard cell ASIC design, no FPGA-Hardcopy.
Their released R&D slides are looking as a typical standard cell ASIC too.
So it's for sure not Altera and hopefully not eASIC, because they have no proven 28nm experience so far. I guess there is a new partner.

Their ambitious delivery dates I rather do not comment. Wink

You're right, HardCopy is not standard cell. Well, if it isn't eASIC or Altera, then it's someone else we don't know about yet. Or it's ON Semi (they have an agreement with Flextronics, whose Flextronics Semi subsidiary eventually ended up at ON Semi - this fits, unless it's the "wrong" Flextronics I'm talking about).

edit: it could also be Synopsys (through the Magma acquisition), since they have/had a tripartite agreement with Flextronics/eASIC.