Gusti has been fielding questions here because I've been busy talking with a lot of different vendors about different options. As we've mentioned before, we're trying to make a business out of this (e.g. we expect to earn a reasonable return on our efforts). In light of the announcements by BFL, we have re-evaluated the direction we were going in (and we were pretty far down that path I might add) and are currently exploring alternatives.
Its time for a reality check; if you have yet to select a fab and process, you cant even have taped out yet, much less have a maskset. What you do have is an FPGA design that might be ported to a process, but that still needs to be done, the analog part probably still needs to be done, the design must be tested, characterized and validated for that process, then you have to order the maskset, wait for it to be produced, then you have to order the wafers, wait for wafer processing, you have to get the chips cut, packaged and tested, design and order and test the PCBs, do Q&A, software, etc.
IOW, you are as far as BFL would have been 9 (or more likely 12) months ago. How in the world do you expect to beat them to market?
Actually, we had already selected a FAB and a process -- for a structured ASIC design. As I said, we were already pretty far down that path when BFL made their announcement. In fact, just weeks away from plunking down 50% of our NRE bill.
Had we gone down that path, we would have been able to produce mining hardware in the same price range as the current BFL singles, but with about 3-4 GH/s of performance. Up until BFL's announcement, this seemed like a good direction to go. Unfortunately, we didn't see any way to get this to market before the beginning of 2013 based on the most aggressive schedules we were able to negotiate. So we decided to look at some alternatives.
At this point, we are negotiating with several potential partners to do a full custom ASIC. Rather than working with companies in established markets with their high NREs and glacier-slow schedules, we have turned to several emerging markets. I'm not prepared to go into any detail at the moment, but suffice it to say that we think we have found a way to do a full-custom ASIC without high NREs and without the usual (Western) time to market. While there are some compromises in terms of not having access to the latest processes, these are more than made up for by lower costs and greater flexibility in other areas.
I seriously doubt BFL is using a 28nm process or even a 45nm process anyway. So if we wind up using a 60nm or 90nm process, we should still have no difficulty being competitive.
Another question that has come up before: If someone wants to build their own boards based on our chips, that is fine. We will make our chips available (either through us or a distributor) and will provide full specifications as well as a reference design (e.g. the basic mining system we will sell). However, we aren't going to provide a maskset so that anyone can go off and have their own chips made -- at least not right away. We are still talking about spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars on NRE and need a way to recover that in order to avoid losing money.