Topic: Bryan Micon's Butterfly Labs Scammer Investigation including Josh Zerlan - page 16. (Read 100053 times)

Josh in his shout box!

Just for shits and giggles as I uploaded the image this popped up to verify I was a human.... Ironic to say the least.

To be fair, I got the refund this morning. Had to fire an email to CS though as it's short by $58 (as they refund in BTC converted from USD)...
That looks to be Bitpay's fault though from what I understand.

I cancelled my 2nd order (February) today until they deliver my 1st order (September). The feedback I was given by BFL_StevenM is quite concerning....







StevenM then ignored me so I asked directly:




So there is a queue for refunds, the queue is apparently that big that it will take 2-3 days to get to my refund request...

Isn't there like a 1000 BTC bet somewhere that will pay out in a few days?

What's a "bumping" facility?  What's NRE?


The more I read these threads and Micons posts, Josh's posts and ensuing flamewars, I am lead to believe AVALON has shipped 10 working units, the rest are defective, and BFL lab miners are held together with rubber bands and band aids.

Its just Josh learning. Over the past few weeks he learned that "2 days" means "the bumping process takes 2 days, but can only be started in 16 days" and that packaging facilities have their own internal planning and arent going to be bribed for a tiny 5 or 6 wafer order.  Shocking.

So now he learned that testing chips takes longer than 24 hours so they are tossing away ~6000 chip candidates to get a handful of chips in testing a few days earlier than otherwise possible. That is 8 months after they started taking your money.  Does that make sense? No. Unless you planned this completely wrong, started production before testing and are still trying to stick to a ridiculous timetable you shouldnt have ever promised in the first place. And even then it doesnt make a lot of sense, because you can only test so much on wire bonded chips. Among other things, it will tell you nothing about the physical properties of the BGA chip  and its going to be hard to do any board level testing.

But he will learn that too, eventually.

Its just Josh learning.

And even then it doesnt make a lot of sense, because you can only test so much on wire bonded chips.

that, my friends, is just making shit up.

My preliminary research

What's a "bumping" facility?  What's NRE?


The more I read these threads and Micons posts, Josh's posts and ensuing flamewars, I am lead to believe AVALON has shipped 10 working units, the rest are defective, and BFL lab miners are held together with rubber bands and band aids.

That whole post was Greek to me. Burning wafers? Just get the shit done.

25 Feb 2013 Update

I know people have been waiting on an update for awhile. The simple fact of the matter is there hasn't been any solid updates to offer. I know people are desperate and starving for information and I wish I could provide new information every day, but some days there just isn't new information. Luckily there is some new information today. It's not the best information (such as we are shipping today!) but it is at least an update.

We had expected the bumping to be done by now, as per the previous update(s). That has not been completed yet. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, and we are not pleased with any of them. The bumping facility, which we have no direct contact with, did not complete the NRE on the timeline we had spoke to the packaging facility about. As I've written in previous posts, we are dealing with such an accelerated time scale that all of these facilities simply aren't used to dealing with. It's been a learning experience for both us and for the facilities we are using. The upside, such as it is, is that going forward, we will have all the large, time sucking hurdles already out of the way and the rest of the chips should breeze through without issue, as all the NRE, tooling, design, planning and machines will already be configured for what we need.

Since Friday we have been, in a word, agonizing over how to make up for lost time. Obviously, we can't make up for all the lost time, but what we have decided is to effectively burn (this is not a technical term, I simply mean we are using one of the wafers for testing instead of creating chips out of it) one of the initial six wafers for testing. This is definitely not something we wanted to do, as it will reduce our initial chip count from a potential 6000 to 5000 chips for the first set of wafers. We are doing this because it will buy us 7 - 12 days for the second set of wafers (and the remaining set of wafers down the road). The time frame between the 1st set of wafers and the 2nd set of wafers should be reduced to a matter of a few days.

Why are we burning the wafer, what advantage does that give us and how can that accelerate the timeline? As many of you already know, we have had the 2nd set of wafers holding with the last layers being unfinished until we confirm we have everything the way we want it on the first set of wafers. We've already started the process to continue laying down layers up until about the last 5 layers or so - by burning one of our precious wafers, we can send it to the ASIC engineers who can essentially wire bond it manually and test the chips, but the wafer will become useless for creating usable chips. By doing this, they will verify that everything is how it needs to be and we can give the foundry the go-ahead to finish the second set as well as the bulk of the chips immediately. The second set of wafers should be done and on their way to us by the time we get chips in house in KC, and the bulk wafers should be done shortly after that.

The test wafer is already on it's way to the ASIC labs and should arrive tomorrow. Presumably it will take a better part of the day to get everything situated and for the testing to begin, so I don't expect to hear anything until late Tuesday or sometime on Wednesday assuming everything goes well. In the meantime, the bumping facility will be bumping the remaining 5 wafers, which should be shipping out on Friday to the packaging house, whom we are paying extra to stay on for the weekend and start the packaging process. We expect at least some of the chips to be on their way to Chicago by Tuesday, where they will be mounted and sent out to our engineers and KC for testing and final MCU programming. At that point, once the MCU programming is confirmed we'll begin assembling the units. Right now, I'm planning on a week from Friday to be the day, but I'm just gonna say that's subject to change at the moment, although I don't anticipate a change right now.

The ASIC team has promised me pictures of the wafer tomorrow, Tuesday the 26th. As soon as I get those, I will be posting them. As soon as I hear something with regards to the chip testing, I will be posting that as well. If I'm not posting an update, it's because there's nothing new to report.