Riiiight... And what Foundry will they be using? None are anywhere near even limited production status @ 7nm. Yes Samsung and GF are doing "tape out' for engineering testing of the layouts but that has little to do with being anywhere close to a viable production status.
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It would seem that Bitcoin mining IC is near perfect test product for a new process: it is repetitive, it tolerates bad yield, it is free of actual trade secrets or intellectual property in its circuitry. It would be beneficial for both foundry and designers to cooperate and profitably sell the wafers fabricated during process bring-up.
GMO being Japanese could have an additional benefit of really being able to sign binding non-disclosure agreements, unlike the mainland Chinese.
I would love to hear from somebody who has current experience. Mine is really dated, but even a very small fab-less company had been trusted with internal fabrication process metrics provided that they made actual technological and legal effort to protect the trade secrets of the fab.
I agree on those points and have in the past said the very same thing about mining chips being a perfect process test platform for the very same reasons you gave. That is probably why Samsung has been eager to make chips for miners from eBang, Innosilicon/Halong Mining, etc. - great way to work out the kinks in their 10nm node.
Yes the Foundries are doing tests/'tape out' at 7nm.
In their IPO document Canaan p.94 mentioned having actual design layout samples of 7nm chips finished by TSMC last month and made mention about possibly having a mass-produced 7nm miner chip by the end of the year. My feeling is that they are assuming that the few remaining issues with EUV are sufficiently addressed by then to keep mask costs far lower.
I just highly doubt any company that is getting it's major funding via ICO token sales and pre-orders can pull this off or be trusted.
On the Intel Foundry services bit - that was new to me. I get a lot of feeds from Intel (mostly about their FPGA's) plus several electronic design feeds - never saw mention of it.
