It is widely believed that the NRE cost of ASIC is very high, while the margin cost of mass ASIC production is very low. However, we happen to be in China, where the NRE cost is much more reasonable (~150k$ for 130nm, ~500k$ for 65nm, furthermore much less if you do a 1/N mask) than most people thought. And we are going to take well advantage of that.
Our approach is incremental in all aspects. We will set several milestones and see what will happen if we achieve each of them. The report on each stage will be posted here.
In the design stage, including both the front-end and the back-end, we are going to fund ourselves. When we are finally ready to turn our design into real chips, we will seek investments, possibly both inside and outside the Bitcoin world. The first batch of our ASIC will not be an end, and we are going to renew our technology with the evolution of the hardware industry, so we are going to make this project a long-term one. However, this thread is not for investment asking, but merely for discussion and our status report.
Open discussions (feel free to add more!)
1. Self mining .vs. Selling hashes .vs. Selling hardware
2. Warnings, e.g. what are the typical causes to a failed ASIC manufacturing
3. Approaches to get enough funding for production
(To be extended)
Status reports
July 18
We have had our IC design company registered at Shenzhen, China. The name of our company is "bitfountain"
We also have signed the confidential contract with the IC manufacturer and got the process library necessary for correct DC synthesis.
July 29
Front-end work done. Preliminary specification given.
August 2
More optimization and trade-offs applied. MH/J improved and Watt/mm^2 reduced at the cost of some chip area increase.
August 11
The pictures of our IC layer are revealed.
(Larger pictures: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1092138)
September 22
We are in the taping-out process with the foundry. The chip spec and interface made public.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1211518
(To be extended)