Quote from: 2112 on March 16, 2018, 04:17:53 PM

"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.

I will check the KncMiner thread and post a link if I can find it.

Also, That's pretty genius of Bitfury. I know of a few professors at University of Houston that are interested in developing some FPGAs for crypto-currency. Also, in college I took full advantage of those type of licenses.

Right now I looking into on-chip temperature sensors and voltage regulation to use in a feedback loop that may require outside IP if feasible which would require a license. Those licenses may forgo the ability to use the non-profit approach.

Something I pulled up after a quick search. It has digital output. Not sure if that is an issue and how to calibrate it.
https://www.design-reuse.com/sip/temperature-sensor-series-6-with-digital-output-tsmc-7nm-ff-high-accuracy-thermal-sensing-for-reliability-and-optimisation-ip-43229/?login=1

Moderator's note: This post was edited by frodocooper to remove a nested quote.