Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks.
A ridiculously long post, and it's filled with assumptions, inaccuracies and unanswerable speculative questions. How long is a piece of string?
-100PH by when? Who determined that? Do you have that in writing and are you considering the possibility of a plateau in difficulty rises? So that is a guess with a large margin of error which you fail to note. Total hash could be 75PH by then which would reduce the required capacity of our farm by 25% - future hash rate it is an unknown figure.
-The 4U expansion units are not 1TH each, there are 6 expansion cases and one master case for our full-sized 55nm-based 10.488TH/s rig giving a figure of 1.498TH/s per unit. You are such an expert (proved substantively wrong twice already today) but you couldn't work that out with
available figures. So your guestimate on this figure is 50% out - because you didn't do the research.
-So we knock 33% off your 16k boards figure to give 10,666 boards.
Suddenly outlay and workload and investment in resources is reduced by a third - and that is fact not a guestimate.
-Wafer numbers - the UMC foundry we are using has a capacity of 45,000 12inch wafers per month. I can't find details on how many chips per wafer UMC will be fabbing.
-The rest of your post is speculation. What are my time estimates on 10k boards? I don't have any, I'm not a PCB fabricator you would need to ask Ken's engineering team that one.
Certainly your knowledge of the industry seem a bit sub-par so with respect I'll trust Ken's expert team on their estimates for this project over yours. Actually MrTeal is pretty much spot on with just about everything he has said.
As far as his "Knowledge' he and ChipGeek have designed, created, and shipped a successful product using BFLs chips so I will trust his knowledge on PCB timeframes and sourcing components.
I second that having 1-2 PH up and running in the timeframe mentioned would be very difficult but not impossible.