The NRE is lowered because it is an FPGA Copy.....
The NRE was ~1M
When I visited California and talked to many individuals that are much more familiar with ASIC costs than I am all stated that 1M NRE for 28nm eASIC (FPGA Copy) is a pretty high NRE.
eASIC Bulk buys these Wafers and has them ready for their customers, they go ahead and charge a couple thousand dollars more per wafer than normal retail and benefit from their bulk purchase and the markup per wafer.
This is my understanding and could be wrong.
First of all, $1M is way lower than you would pay for a full maskset on 28nm. Depending on the number of layers and who you believe, that could easily cost $3-$5M. Im just talking about the physical mask, not the design.
Secondly, I dont think you understand how structured asics work. They cant be prefabricated, or at least no entirely. Easic may do wafers with some of the standard layers ready, but they will still need to be processed at the fab to implement the customized routing and extra layers. Its not like easic can take those from the shelve, its not an fpga. So whatever price you heard, is that for fully processed wafers, or preprocessed wafers? Either way, per wafer price is going to be (substantially) higher than for traditional asics, otherwise everyone would do it.
I think you are overpricing 28nm maskset, Physical Design + Full MaskSet + First Batch Wafers would cost $3-$5M total on a
Full Custom 28nmLike I said, this isn't full custom. This is an FPGA Port and is much easier to do the Physical Design, many less Layers, and the Wafers cost a little more because they are all primed and ready with the basic layers needed to speed up fabrication. (You are effectively paying a premium for speed)
Many people don't use a FPGA Copy because it is power inefficient and you could get much more out of a Full-Custom. Read as Wasted Silicon.
But in the Bitcoin world eASIC is perfect because we only need a short lifespan of the Chips to pay for the NRE + more even if they are inefficient.
Either way even if the Wafers are a tad more expensive than I'm led to believe, wafer costs are the lowest cost of this whole ordeal.
$15,000 Wafer (for example purposes)
2,500 Chips
16GH Chip
$0.375/GH
Edit: Either way none of this even matters because we have zero information and likely will continue to have zero information until there is a physical device ready.
I don't understand this way of business but at this point there's not much else we can do besides waiting for that day to come (or not)
In the ASIC industry there's also no standard pricing, everyone gets different deals for this and that so it's really hard to come up with what should cost what anyways.
