Quote from: NODEhaven on March 09, 2018, 11:46:27 PM

This is by far one of the better threads I have come across on Bitcointalk.

If its not too much, could you describe a little on how KnC "sandbagged" the design and why didn't they use Europractice?

"sandbagging" means that they used quite large factors of safety in their design ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety describes is for mechanical/structural designs ). E.g. if the design tool came up with N um wide power rail they actually drawn the power rail as S*N where S > 1 . If their simulation computed that the maximum clock speed will be F MHz, they used D*F (where D < 1) in their published specification.

One of their executives enumerated their multiple layers of safety margins in the video they published upon initial release of their miners. Maybe somebody archived it somewhere in the KnC thread?

Europractice access is limited to educational/research/non-profit institutions. KnC from the beginning was a funded for-profit corporation. On the other hand Bitfury (person) initially developed his chip with cooperation from some Polish research institute before funding the Bitfury (corporation).

I keep mentioning Europractice/Mosis in the thread like this because it is an obvious and effective way of saving money in the initial stages of a design. Lots of folks keep mentioning multi-million dollar initial costs of developing the mining ASICs. But this is quite obviously not true if somebody knows how to use the educational discounts and how to deal with associated limitations on merchantability.