There are no vias on the picture they sent.
Check out a photo of Terrahash Avalon clone boards....they look similar but have a
few more components.
http://www.btcpedia.com/terrahash-avalon-asic-bitcoin-miner/These are very basic "boards" shown, I'm guessing FR4 0.062" standard 2-4 layer boards.
Based on the reference designs I've seen so far I'm thinking they are just 2 layer, this isn't rocket science.
There is no pcb designer in the world that would decide to route every single one of his traces inside the board through the ground plane shown on the top surface using vias. That would mean that all smd components would have to be mounted on the backside of the board.
The only reason we route certain signals to different internal layers is to surround the signal trace with a ground plane to reduce noise, or if the physical real estate is just too tight to get a signal where it needs to go.
Someone else mentioned....as a minimum you need decoupling caps close to the power/ground inputs on any chips...as close as possible. Usually I would put them tight to the chip, within 10mm is a general rule. So they decided to put those caps on the backside? Strangest design ever.
Anyone who has worked with pcb design knows this is garbage.
This looks like what happens the first time you send off a design to a pcb house and get back a pile of unusable laughable crap.
That's what I'm guessing happened here...one of their so called engineers learning to use Eagle for the first time and made a big mistake.
Thank you for taking the time to provide some usable information. Similar to the thoughts put forward in the reddit thread. In a way, it is good news. It gives an explanation for why they haven't been able to put together a functioning miner. Not good that they won't admit it though.
There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that they don't have a functioning miner. The only evidence that exists suggests that they do have a functional miner and they're busy ironing out the problems they've come up against. That evidence also suggests that they have the necessary resources to pump out a fair amount of hashing power in the next few weeks.
You choose to ignore the only evidence that exists in favour of opinions pulled out the arses of random people on the internet, some of whom are by their own words, here just to mock people and get revenge for ActM's price tanking.
The one thing I can completely assure you is that no one is hashing anything with the boards they show in that picture.
Not probable, simply not possible. Those are non-functioning boards.
If they can take a picture of unpopulated boards, they should be able to take a picture of populated ones too.
Those boards and chips are side by side, the populated ones must be very near by also. Why not show a populated one?
If they had one, we would be seeing it already, they would scream it from the rooftops.
" The only evidence that exists suggests that they do have a functional miner..."
What evidence do we have that they have hashed at all? Maybe I missed this statement.
Last night we screamed for 10 pages to give us a mining address....it didn't happen.
They said Monday that they were hashing at 2TH, that has so far turned out to be unverifiable.
I'm not saying it's a lie...but they haven't been able to provide a single shred of evidence to prove that they are hashing at all....talk about debugging hardware that no EE in the world would believe could possibly be functional.