Quote from: HyperMega on April 26, 2016, 08:19:06 AM

Yes, but this is not much for a mining ASIC even in 22nm. I guess it should equate to about 10 ... 15 unrolled hash cores, because this 22nm GF node is only a 80% shrink of the GF 28nm node, not a true 50% shrink like other 20nm nodes. But therefore the 22nm masks cost only a little bit more than a 28nm mask set.

This is a perfect example of daft thinking of a CAD monkey. No sane hardware engineer would waste that valuable real estate (50 plots of 3 square millimeters each) to fill it out with identical unrolled cores and try to commercially mine with them. The sane engineer would fill those 3 sq.mm with as many different interesting designs as he/she could think of and then compare simulated results with actual results to gauge the accuracy of the toolchain. That is the whole point of prototyping.

I understand that some people find "CAD monkey" term offensive. But such proposal as above is equally offensive to the normal hardware engineers. That is why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_monkey epithet was invented to quickly distinguish a narrow subset of programmers.

Quote from: HyperMega on April 26, 2016, 08:19:06 AM

And yes, Universities have these tools almost for free, but for strictly non-commercial use. As soon as you want to design something, which could be commercialized directly or indirectly it is illegal to use University licenses for it. If something like this would be discovered by the EDA vendors, you and the University would have huge problem.

This never happens to students or faculty at non-profit schools. It does happen in for-profit schools or maybe at non-profits when administrative staff gets involved in theft or unauthorized resale. In normal schools the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_freedom and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_freedom will easily trump the short term commercial concerns.

Quote from: HyperMega on April 26, 2016, 08:19:06 AM

If you like to get your feeds in the water here, it would be better to cooperate with a IC design service company at least for the first project. You bring the chip concept and architecture, they help you to design, manufacture, package and test it.
From my point of view, it is almost impossible to build up the required competences from scratch, despite you hire some experienced IC designers in your company.
Where is your company located?

I worked for a while for EDA vendor and I start sensing a sales-critter. I'm the last person to try to blame the sales person for trying to earn the commission. In fact I'm still grateful for being invited the celebratory party of one salesman who with single sale funded (pre-paid) college education of two of his kids.

I also remember particular post trade-show dinner party (in Anaheim,CA or Las Vegas,NV) with various EDA industry bigwigs. One thing I remembered was one founder being asked how he got money to start up. His story was that out of school he was reselling used office furniture. One time they bid several k$ for a closed office of some major US automotive concern (Ford? can't recall anymore). It turned out that the cabinets were filled with Ford's(?) internal paperwork related to hard-to-fix warranty repair problems. They actually successfully blackmailed Ford(?) into buying those cabinets back for some 1M$.

Why I'm retelling this story? People need to learn how to bargain with EDA vendors. Here's a quick example:

Quote from: Simon Barber on August 09, 2013, 12:17:13 AM

Quote from: minternj on August 09, 2013, 12:09:23 AM

So power consumption variance is +-20%, can we infer the same with hash rate then? Since usually more power means more heat to dissipate.

Most commonly the power consumption of real silicon comes in better (lower) than the predictions from the Apache Redhawk tool we are using. The cooling system in the Baby Jet is massively over engineered, to give some margin, and to support overclocking.

Cheaply buy out of the bankruptcy the intellectual property that went through that Apache Redhawk simulation with gross errors. Then talk to Ansys https://www.apache-da.com/ to fund a research grant that would establish the reasons for such large errors and ways to correct their products. It is not much of business idea but it is an idea of how to not only get expensive EDA tool for free but also get funding/grant for its use at a research university.