Being produced? You realise that it takes a long time to produce them, right? This means that if the initial batch doesn't work (annoyingly high chance), it takes a long time to get the second batch. If that doesn't work either, you're forced to delay the shipment for a third, etc.
You are talkng out of your ass.
Before ANY production runs (of ANY electronic device) are made the design is already completely prototyped and working.
No person in the world will run a production batch of an untested unprototyped design.
It would be a complete waste of money because it is almost 100% sure there will be some form of design error.
You can only start making predictions about the time it takes for one batch IF you have a working prototype and your product is quite finished.
THEN and only then do you invest money in an actual production run.
The BFL delivery dates don't add up. They must know fully well that their 'dates' were unresponsibly optimistic. Furthermore it appears they are fully depending on some 3rd party for their product since they say they will deliver soon but still have no prototype. This propably also means that the 3rd party they take the product from still has to do all the testing phases etc before they can produce a batch.
If their claim that BFL designed the chip themselfs is true then i don't think it is financially possible to run a batch without first going through several revisions which implies several more or less working prototypes.
Since BFL doesn't have a working prototype (or at least are unable or unwilling to show it) you can SAFELY assume they are not ready for a real batch of any size.
So for now BFL has given no reason whatsoever to trust that they will deliver anytime soon.
In any case, BFL claims they have extra special super experience with delays from the FPGA batches and have therefore claimed that they will, for sure, deliver in october 2012.
It is now January 2013, BFL showed an empty case on CES and they still haven't got a clue when exactly they will deliver.
This just means they have no control whatsoever about the process. They have shown that the dates they mentioned were meaningless.
One
could even say their shipment dates are outright lies because they were never realistic in the first place given the fact that there is no prototype.
Let's see...
If I'm BFL, and working to try to get chips to customers, would I rather spend $100k on a 3rd full run of chips (after supposedly all of the problems from the first two batches have been fixed), hoping that they work properly, or would I rather spend $10k on prototype chips so that I can test first, risking $3M in preorders by forcing customers to wait ANOTHER 4-6 weeks for a full production run?
$90k sounds like a reasonable cost when you're talking about the risk of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of preorders being cancelled and sales shifting to other companies.
ASIC is all about who is first to product. $100k is almost a drop in the bucket to get the products ready to ship ASAP.
