Bitcoin Forum

update
 
We hoped to get in touch with at least a few new viable companies with the right competences and exposure to bitcoin, but we are frankly overwhelmed by the amount and quality of responses we have received so far.  We are more convinced than ever that this is the correct business approach to minimize our risks, guarantee proper execution and allow end users a choice of supplier and implementation.

However,  we also believe its in no one's interest to have too many partners duplicating their engineering and marketing efforts and killing each others margins. Therefore, we will review all current applications and new ones we may yet receive this week, and somewhere next week (first week of March), we will select and contact a few companies we deem to be best positioned to start formal negotiations with.

Original post follows.


Hello,

We are looking for system integrators to help bring to market another ASIC-based bitcoin miner.  Partners will be supplied with packaged and tested high performance ASICs, all technical specifications, a reference design for the PCB and early software. We expect our partners to implement or customize our PCB design, perform or oversee the PCB assembly, system design, manufacturing and assembly of the end-user devices, handle sales, marketing, logistics and after sales support.  We may also require some help with the software, but we are looking to contract someone for that.

About our ASIC

Our currently unnamed bitcoin mining chip taped out last October; we (ab)used spare estate on our 28nm SOI MLM test wafers we were running at ST Microelectronics. Several successful wafer test runs have been conducted since, and as a result, we currently have a limited number of functional chips that can be supplied for testing and validation.  We are about to sign a deal that allows us to produce these chips in volume. Packaged chips are expected to start arriving in volume in June of this year.

Since we use state of the art 28nm SOI technology, our chip is quite significantly more power efficient and higher performing than anything currently announced or shipping.  The downside of our technology is that we require expensive wafers and we are using a multi layer mask, so our per chip production costs are likely higher than our competitors. But since no one else is selling asics, and no one has a product that can match our specifications, we can assure prospective partners that our per chip prices will be low enough to allow them to compete very favorably in all relevant metrics with current known suppliers and that we have more than enough margin to follow aggressive price cuts that we expect will happen over the course of this year.  I realize this is vague, but we will release exact performance data and cost estimates under NDA to prospective partners. I can guarantee you will not be disappointed.

Performance and costs aside, one other notable feature of our chip is that each one integrates an ARM Cortex M3 core which is fully capable of running linux and mining software. Our reference design board provides up to 256 MB RAM, USB, ethernet and Sdcard controllers allowing each board to mine without needing a host.  Our reference board hosts only one mining asic, but even a single chip is more capable than most competing multi chip solutions. We currently have no design for multi chip boards, but its entirely possible for partners to design a PCB that will hold many ASICs, without duplicating all the IO. The chips are designed to be used as slaves, although we have not yet tested this in hardware.

We currently have one integrator that has committed to bringing our chip to market, but we are looking for at least 3 more. Our prices will be the same for every partner, and will vary only with quantity.

About  us

I represent a small team of highly skilled engineers with decades of experience in developing custom soc's for embedded and mobile applications. Unlike our competition, we realize we dont have the skills, time, resources or expertise to go from silicon to end user satisfaction. Thats why we decided to find partners who can complement our skills and provide the mining market with more choice and competition.

We are in the process of setting up a GmbH under swiss law, but we prefer to remain out of the spotlight to avoid our non bitcoin customers perceiving conflicts of interest. Obviously any partners will get to know exactly who we are.  We can arrange meetings and demo's in Switzerland or France.

If you are interested in partnering with us, contact me helveticoin at gmail dot com and please provide some information to help us judge your ability to integrate our chip in a consumer product. Large scale mining operations are also welcome to inquire, but do realize you will face non trivial technical challenges and costs to develop a functional miner,  and we will require minimum quantities. Technical and financial details will be provided under NDA only.

I will try to occasionally answer questions on this forum, but serious inquiries should be sent by email.

Regards,

Helveticoin

(I would appreciate if this post could be moved from newbies to custom hardware and getting whitelisted so i can respond to questions)

(reserved for aaq)

This is awesome.  I can't do this but I know two people who would be great at this.  Either one has shown great ability at getting a business started and generating large sales.  Tom in particular has a proven business assembling and marketing PCB designs.  Give them a call:

Thomas Van Riper
tom@devcoin.org
(315) 514-0269
Prior successful business: https://www.btcfpga.com/

Trendon Shavers
tshavers@buscog.com
(214) 856-4386
Prior successful business: http://btcst.com, http://www.gpumax.com

Lol ;D

To which address do I tip BTC?

I can act as bounty hunter in case they don't deliver :D :P Good luck with your business.

The most important metric in current market is not power efficiency (Hash/J), but simply price per Hash/s. Sounds like you are far behind the competitors.
Another detail to note is that your professionally written call for partners is posted in a fucking internet forum. Any group of graduate students in Switzerland would be a better place to look for the solution you need, not to mention simple advertisement on a professional Website or in a journal, or even LinkedIn. I suspect this has got something to do with users of this forum having a proven competitive advantage compared to other groups I listed when it comes to sending advance payments to random story-tellers.

Why not to look at these great 28nm chips first?  8)

Because

Wow.  I've never been tipped before.  15BRMpNev4p264f1M3npns7VfB1BFTWzf7 (https://blockchain.info/address/15BRMpNev4p264f1M3npns7VfB1BFTWzf7) will do.

This is a very serious design mistake to mix up the hashing units and their controller on a single chip.

The primary problem is that anytime there is a internal miscompare detected it is impossible to distinguish the hasher failure from the controller failure. Therefore the whole design will have to be run at a fixed voltage and fixed frequency far away from the limits of the 28nm manufacturing process.

In addition to the above problem you'll suffer from the standard problems of manufacturing a chip containing complex circuitry like a SOC:

1) relatively low yield when compared to a repetitive chip like hashers,
2) you'll actually have to develop and pay for proper test of each manufactured chip unlike the hashers that are pretty much self-testing,

Finally, Cortex-M architecture doesn't run normal Linux because of the lack of the MMU that is included in Cortex-A chips that are popular tragets for Linux on ARM. It is possible to run some cut-down Linux on the MPU that is available in Cortex-M processors.

On the positive side Cortex-M is more resilient than Cortex-A in the presence of power-supply ripple and the extremes of the chip temperatures. The first circuitry to fail when overclocking/undervolting ARM is the MMU. So you'll be able to live somewhat closer to the edge of the process.

Another example of why decades of experience are no match for one year of clear thinking.

I doubt that the hasher portion of the chip has enough connectivity to the pins to be able to run it separately on a chip where Cortex-M3 failed the tests. But it may be possible to fill out all the available code memory of Cortex-M3 with multiple implementations of a trivial hasher driver that uses various instruction sequences. When the CPU portion of the chip fails it may still execute properly only some of the instructions or the code where every other instruction is a NOP.

The last time I had information about per-instruction failure rates was for Intel 80386 chips. An example of permanent manufacturing failure: certain 32-bit multiplications failed. If you only used 16-bit multiply everything was working fine. An example of temporary failure due to overclocking/undervolting: POP SS failed. But if you had a code than never modified the stack segment register it would work fine, so the CPU was useable if the whole code&data fit within 64kB and the segment registers were never modified.

As a software developer you may be able to develop a similar set of rules and workarounds for Cortex-M. As a partner just design a large PCB where single Cortex-A SOC running proper Linux controls the multitude of those Cortex-M & hasher chips.

First Id like to thank (most of) the people that contacted me via email. I will get back to you once I return to my office and after I got the green light from our legal counsel regarding the non disclosure agreements, then we can discuss how to move forward.

As for some of the comments on this forum; Im not sure I understand all the questions or remarks, but to clarify, we are not looking for funding. Our operation is fully funded. If anyone wants to see our chips, a demo can be arranged as mentioned above, but it will require you sign an NDA.

As for our competitiveness; our approach certainly isnt the cheapest, but unit production cost of asics is only a tiny fraction of current retail value of asic based miners, and is typically measured in single or low double digits.  So even if our chip cost 5x or 10x  more per GH than those of our colleagues (which it doesnt), our partners will have no trouble competing with other end user solutions.  Over time we expect retail prices to drop low enough for per chip production costs to become a handicap, but only after difficulty has increased tremendously. At that point power efficiency will again become a key selling point, and that is where we have our largest advantage,  so I feel we and our partners will be able to remain competitive no matter what for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, about our decision to implement an ARM core; this was driven primarily for reasons unrelated to bitcoin. One might even say we decided to add a bitcoin miner to some ARM test chips. However, this isnt a handicap.  Even though this tiny core clocks higher than you probably think, the core has its own clock domain and voltage plane. As I indicated earlier, the bitcoin miner can operate with or without the ARM core, and the latter only occupies a negligible portion of our transistor budget. It does use a more significant part of the IO connectors, but the flipside of that will be cheaper PCBs and overall  the chip still has a very low ball pitch.  In short; if you dont like it, just pretend it isnt there and feel free to add an external soc of your choosing.

OK, I apparently misunderstood what it meant to be a "slave chip".
So, yaeh, if the "slave mode" actually works as advertised this may be a very competitive entry. The NRE costs are spread over multiple designs from the same European ASIC house. Just consider the entire Cortex-M3 a single large "defect" when estimating yield, because it only occupies a neglible portion of the chip area. I'm going to make an assumption that the designers were sane and they provided individual "clock enable" bits for the subregions of the hashing region of the chip so that the defect of a single hashing core doesn't disqualify a whole chip.

I always consider it a good sign when vendor gives a forthcoming and reasonable explanation for a misfeature or a drawback.

I wish good luck to everyone involved.

Edit: If you could answer one more question without an NDA: does the SoC have some analog circuitry to measure the temperature of the chip? Or at least there is some circuitry attached to some pin that will allow to build a temperature-to-leakage,leakage-to-time,time-to-digital termometer for the chip proper?

Thanks.

At this rate you might beat BFL to market.

BFL is 65nm correct? So this chip would have (65/28)2= ~5.4x higher density. So all other things being equal, you would expect at least 5x the performance per mm2 or per wafer. Factor in SOI and higher clockspeeds and it might be 6-7-8x?  Ignoring fixed costs, how can this be more expensive per GH than BFL? Is SOI really that expensive?

Ill be interesting funding or even buying bulk orders if you are saying is going to be competitive and very interested in getting in contact with you to have a chat.

If you are saying what is true, How long befor you have a website up with some product information pricing shipping etc?

I'd be a willing beta tester,lol.

Can you comment without an NDA on the design of the ASIC?
Do you use a rolled or unrolled design?
Is the hashing logic hand optimized or does it use standard cell libraries?

Yes, How about a website with more details? About the team, their background and expertise. Sounds interesting, but more specifics are needed.
Regards,
Brian

The questions about website, price etc. are for the system integrators which are looked for, not for helveticoin. The integrator(s) will offer the miners, so wait a few months.

Allow me reiterate the purpose of this post was to get in contact with potential manufacturing partners (and as such, it is proving to have been very worthwhile), not to find funding, secure pre orders or satisfy everyone's curiosity. As a rule of thumb,  I will divulge information in so far it helps potential partners determine if its worth their while to talk to us,  but providing implementation details would not achieve that and might expose details Im not comfortable sharing. So Im not willing or able to elaborate on the questions posted above, even if  I do feel that applying some common sense would answer most of them.

As for our website, its near the bottom of our long todo list, and if we get around making one, dont expect to find lots of personal or technical details. I hinted at the reasons for the former,  and we will leave it to our partners to announce their products and provide you with their technical specifications, performance,  time tables and prices at the time they deem appropriate.

edit: what RHA said.

thank you helveticoin for providing EU ASICs. can't wait to be your customer :)

I've always hoped that there were a couple of organisations developing ASICs under the radar.  Let's hope this one is legitimate.  Sounds like they're doing what Avalon originally hoped to do.

I think you've misunderstood what they're looking for.  They're just making chips and won't be supplying anything to end users.  They're looking for companies who want to get into the ASIC market without having to develop their own chips - how each company utilises those chips will determine which company's products offer the best value for end users.  There'll basically be 3 or 4 companies designing their product around the same chip - just like many companies use Intel's chips for their products.

The advantage to the companies is that they're starting off with a 28 nm chip which will be improved upon over time and not having to pay the chip development costs.  Smaller chips are one of the things which will inevitably happen with other ASIC developers, but not until they've recovered their R&D costs on their first generation and made a considerable profit to boot.  

It's unlikely this is going to be the only B2B chip producer to enter the ASIC market.  If these guys are for real, it signals the beginning of real competition in the ASIC market.

Well, since the helveticoin user is tight lipped I had to search the STmicro press releases:


http://www.st.com/web/en/press/en/t3343


http://www.st.com/web/en/press/en/t3370

Pretty soon anyone in EU-landia could probably order this process through Europractice, the same way as bitfury did.

Get in touch with Yohan (http://'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=56598'), a rep from Enterpoint (http://'www.enterpoint.co.uk'). It sounds like they are developing a second generation device in-house but perhaps, if what you have is competitive in price and performance, they could integrate your solution into a product for the market.

I hope this gets off the ground-should be very interesting for the BTC ASIC market- numerous vendors of a powerful chip offering different features and price points to compete for market.

Reminds me of how the mother board market works more so than the video card market. You can have $200 mother boards using the same bridge chips as a $500 mother board, just the final features and implementation varies. But at each price point there is competition for market.

Will be watching for this with interest

It would be a great thing from an end-user point of view, given that BFL is really the only company whose objective from the outset was to develop an ASIC unit for retail sale.  Avalon originally intended to manufacture chips and not complete units and ASICMiner intended to make their boards available for sale rather than complete units.  One or more companies wholesaling chips alone will likely lead to more options for those seeking to buy complete units at a retail level as well as for those who want to buy/develop complete boards only.

That someone would enter this market is something current ASIC vendors should definitely have foreseen, and it will be interesting to see how their business models accommodate an increasing amount of competition so soon after launch.

This method could be very price competitive.

Take BFL. 8 chips per board, and those chips are a few $$s each to produce, but the development costs have to be spread over the units only BFL sells.

Avalong uses ALOT of slightly less expensive chips, but their cost to produce all those chips and boards etc would likely actually cost them more than BFL. Not to mention their volumes will be smaller- they just aren't set up for really high volumes of assembly it seems, and the power consumption will cost them sales.

For these new chips they will cost more than BFL's-say 5 times more for the integrator once you have paid costs and share of dev. But *if* you only need 2 of them for the same performance you have a small on cost to the integrator compared to BFL-but BFL still have to pay their development costs.

Look at the cost of a motherboard. Most good boards cost $200-$300AUD, and the fancier ones cost up to $500. Now consider all the bridge chips, controllers, LAN chips, audio chips, capacitors etc etc, there is a lot that goes on them. Since there are so many board models the only thing really made in huge volumes are the chips themselves which are used by many different vendors, the cost to develop each board is spread over smaller numbers.

Could this result in a $500 low power high hash ASIC? Possibly if enough integrators come along and compete with each other. It may not be possible for BFL to compete at that price, and I'd say Avalon will be done by the time those prices come around.
Could BFL become the 2nd 28Nm ASIC chip supplier so we get an Intel/AMD battle? Intel still makes their own boards as well. If BFL goes this path for their 2nd gen ASIC then mining really will stay affordable.

Still looking forward to Q3/Q4 to see these new ASIC integrators show their stuff. I can wait til then to part with my $$.

I wonder whether BFL even considered this possibility in their risk management assessments.  This might not even be the only company which has developed chips which are near ready for release to the B2B market.  For all we know, there's another company out there we haven't yet heard of which has end user units almost ready for release, too.

This could force BFL to go to a smaller process sooner than they'd originally planned, or to drop the prices of their current units earlier than they'd hoped.  It's definitely going to be interesting as more and more players enter the ASIC market.

3 2 1 ... que kano.

cgminer support for hardware.

Q4? Delays are always possible, but dont be indoctrinated by BFL. Keep in mind these guys claim to already have chips, in that sense they are way ahead of BFL. I dont know how long it takes to design and manufacture a custom PCB for something like this, but certainly based on a ref design, those integrators should be ready when these guys get their chips. They will have had some time to have tested the boards and software using the preproduction chips. So if they do get the chips in june, why couldnt they ship in june?  BFL seems to think they can ship mere days after they get their first ever chips.

What I am curious about is when we will see those vendors announce their product and start accepting (pre)orders. BFL has shown the advantage to them of announcing early and since we might see multiple competing vendors with very comparable products soon, I dont think it will be very long.

Wow if this turns out to be real, and I'm calling this one early (with a lower degree of confidence 4 posts in) that OP seems extremely real from the onset.  This is how a good corporate citizen would act after building their first prototypes and testing the process. 

This seems like a no-bullshit business that has already successfully completed the R&D phase (unlike some guys out there...) and are taking the right steps to bring the chip to market. 

Hopefully they've learned something from the other vendors and will unveil their product when they already have their supply chain in order and can offer a rapid turnaround time on orders.

Someone has to break the whole pre-order thing sooner or later and start offering ASICs with less than a week's turnaround time - it might as well be one of the new players because BFL is so hopelessly backlogged now that the only way they're going to be able to offer a reasonable turnaround time on orders this year is if they stop taking new orders for a while, and Avalon is likely to continue producing their ASICs in small batches for the foreseeable future.

Yeah I agree. *IF* there is a reference design and firmware/mining software in place then integrators with their own production equipment could have tested systems ready in Q3. If there is no reference, or different integrators want to do different implementations, might take longer.
Plus hey doesn't hurt to be pessimistic when thinking about when you are going to get some new mining hardware  ;)

Great thread. 

email sent, looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

If the silicon is ready and well documented, I wouldn't be surprised to see boards available shortly after the first production runs get out of fab and packaging. Creating a nicely packaged product like BFL is going to be a relatively longer timeframe, but developing a board with several hashing chips, off the shelf POL modules for power and a small MCU or the included Cortex for USB comms in the style of the MMQ is something a competent PCB designer could do in a weekend. Even the firmware shouldn't take long, and miner support should be relatively quick. More optimized designs could come out later, but there's not reason that hashing units couldn't be in customer's hands no later than a month after chips are ready to be shipped in volume, and that's with a buffer for testing and needing to do a quick respin of the PCB.

I doubt it was considered. And it might not make much difference either way. What I mean is, there's really zero downward pressure on prices... assuming that the new offering isn't orders of magnitude better (and a move from 65 to 28 really isn't going to show that much gain imo). You'll dirty the water by having multiple board designers... which maybe help with the prices being lower...

But the long and short of it is... if they don't absolutely destroy BFL as far as power draw and shiny packaging they aren't really competition long term. And even if they are... there's no reason they wouldn't have pricing thats identical or very close to BFLs.

Mr Teal- I hope your prediction is more correct than mine!

Firefop- from a business prospective you are correct. Why would you charge half the price of the competition when you could charge about the same and make a similar amount of sales. If they have speed and power advantages they could make the claim of "we are better you pay more" just like BFL are doing currently.

I don't think the BTC community is that worried about fancy cases. They/we are used to playing with computer boards and cables, and plenty had FPGAs which had no cases at all. Yes the BFL cases look nice, but I was planning on getting mine without the case to increase airflow- function over form for me, and when it comes to making ROI I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one!!

helveticoin - I'm desperate for some teaser specs off your reference test board. If you want people to hold out and not spend their $$ on BFLs and Avalon before you and your integrators launch then give us a reason to postpone!! What clock speed speed have you reached with your current cooling method, and what power and hash results did you get? Yes it will vary depending on what the integrators do for cooling etc, but it would give us something to ponder when considering a future purchase.

Hmm one chip as fast as other vendors multi chip systems- if an integrator used a standardised heat sink mounting pattern it would be killer for aftermarket cooling and even off the shelf water cooling (please please please!!)

update added to OP.

A lot of people are sending requests through the forum message system, and some are requesting our email.
The email is stated in the first post: helveticoin at. gmail dot com and I would greatly prefer you use that because I have to fill out captcha's to reply to forum messages.

I understand there is a lot of interest and speculation about our time to market. As a principle, we do not want to pre-announce our customers announcements. However, bitcoin asic market is somewhat unique, and gives a huge and unfair advantage to companies announcing early even if they deliver late. Since we want your suppliers to compete on service and technical merits, rather than on the date they announce or start accepting preorders, we will synchronize their product announcements. A date for this is yet to be set, but I hope doing this in May will also give our new partners sufficient time to prepare and we should be sure of our ability to deliver by then. If our partners agree, we will put out a common statement much earlier giving end users a better idea of what to expect and when to expect it.  This could happen in a few weeks time.

It maybe sounds funny, but did you ever considered supplying a limited amount of chips to those individuals who can make their own PCB and want to use them in DIY miner with ARM-core ? no ASIC manufacturers doing this yet, you can be first.
I think it's a great possibility to create a miner-on-a-chip with some general purpose interfaces for extended use.
It's a good idea to make miner core as a secondary option, as even when mining not actual any more, such board can still be used for other purposes in a manner like raspberry-pi.

would be interesting to see, will there be chip demos? Will to show up physically for this.

I see a ASIC GPL cooperation between China and Switzerland as benefical for the whole Bitcoin comunity.

When this works out are we gonna be able to trade-in AVALON 110nm for AVALON 28nm ?

Good luck OP this is exciting stuff.

I hope you guys can find an integrator that will give the "average joe" (like me!) more confidence to purchase mining gear and get into bitcoin mining.

The semiconductor industry is having huge problem right now, bitcoin is the savior for ST ;D

I hope the referense design is usb or esata interface, just plug in and mine

he said the reference design has network and USB controllers. But of course an integrator could do something different.
In theory you could have boards connected to each other via USB hub, and one board using the ARM core to run the mining software. So you could have a more expensive "primary" board and numerous "secondary" or "slave" boards that don't have all the extra sub systems required on the "primary" and hence cost a bit less. You could then build your own mini rig!!

I really think it would be in our interests to move away from USB as the primary connection method (as a long term goal). Why not ethernet or stat. At least then we could have the option of daisy chaining devices together.

As to your previous comment about shiny cases... I'd be fine with having to build my own rack to use bleeding edge tech... but when we're talking about a retail product that can be mass produced it has to be presented well... the only serious options imho a stand-alone case like the BFL mini-rig or a rack mounted case if you want to go for purity of function. I really wish somebody would produce a u3 or u5 asic miner that I could be sold in small lots and just stuck into a rack.

Bump this thread a little, this is more likely to be coming months' topic  :)

Many people here must have contacted with him already. Why not say something and confirm if this is real?

We have been flooded with RFI's, I apologize if we havent replied to everyone (yet)
(That apology doesnt extend to those still sending personal forum messages, as pointed out numerous times, please use our email address, as we have better things to do than solve captcha's all day.)

Based on contacts and initial feedback so far, we have made a slight adjustment to our initial plan. In a first phase, we will concentrate our time on two selected companies with a proven trackrecord in B2C (manufacturing, logistics, worldwide sales and after sales support) that are willing and able to market a reference implementation. Time to market is critical, so we want to make sure end users will have several choices of providers this summer, even if this goes at the expensive of diversity of technical solutions initially.

In a second phase we will talk to some of the many engineering companies that have contacted us, most of which appear to have the required technical know how, but have little or no trackrecord in medium volume B2C. We will help those companies create custom implementations for our product,  which they can either use themselves, sell themselves, or sell to our customer facing partners.  We expect to enter the second phase in a few weeks, after we are satisfied our first B2C partners will be ready in time with reference implementations. This means custom solutions may or may not hit the market in time for our first production run, but our first priority is to make sure our chips will not sit idle in a warehouse all summer.

To answer a few recurring questions from forum users:

- Is company X or Y using your ASIC?
We have nothing to do with the other recent asic announcements on this forum. We do not know those companies, and they are not using our product. I also couldnt tell if they are real or not.

-Whats the performance of your chip? How much will it cost? When will it ship?
The performance of our product will be unveiled at a later date in a joint statement with our partners, expected before the end of this month. I understand miners want to know now, but the reality is that  early performance figures will not help you much deciding if you should buy from our competitors as long as our numbers are not complemented with a price and rock solid shipping date. Especially the price cant be determined today and we cant yet promise a precise shipping date. All I can say with confidence is that we will have a technically superior product and our price will be competitive; I might also add one of our suppliers plans to sell its products through constant auctions, so you will determine the price yourself.

-What will happen to difficulty when you ship? How many TH will you add this year?
It should come as no big surprise that the aggregate hashrate of our first production wafer run is expected to be in the petahash range, but I cant comment yet on a time table for its arrival on the market.

-Will you partner with competing company X or Y?
We do not exclude the possibility of anyone partnering with us; anyone that buys our chips is first and foremost a customer, rather than a competitor. Since no one else is selling asics at this point, we could consider ourselves without direct competition. However, we are focused on not repeating the mistake some of our colleagues made by underestimating the challenges of B2C.

Will You disclose the two companies ? If yes, when ?

Says so in the same post:
The performance of our product will be unveiled at a later date in a joint statement with our partners, expected before the end of this month.

right. I need more coffee :-)

Thanks for the feedback. Also respect that you don't wish to make statements or promises you then don't deliver on.

I don't like the constant auction method. Will mean they make a stack load of money as customer clammer to get their hands on them. Should see how people are jumping at the idea of 80ghs at 800w. I would rather order at a known price that I can weigh up the pros and cons of features and pricing and be told the lead time for orders.

It would be good to know what your chips can do. Sure you can't make a choice without a prce and timing, but from a tech hungry point of view it would be interesting. A statement like "we predict each chip to operate at xx-yy ghs per second and have a power window around 0.x-0.y w per ghs. Your integrators final performance will then likely vary depending on their cooling performance and hardware they build with.

I don't really understand this paragraph. What kind of functionality can those chips provide?

If it is a bitcoin mining chip as you said,  you should have started some mining operation on the network since last October?

they may have made their ROI by mining with their test chips, and now that difficulty is going up they will sell chips to us....

tapeout happened in october, this is a technical term that refers to finishing the design. It doesnt mean functional chips, its the last step before you send your stuff to the fab for production. It sounds like they have produced a few test chips earlier this year,  mass production only slated for june. So they may have a few chips mining for a few months now, assuming they have working boards and software, but thats not likely to draw a lot of attention in the stats anywhere.

"we (ab)used spare estate on our 28nm SOI MLM test wafers we were running at ST Microelectronics"
interpretations:
1. This is not just few chips if the chip is on the MLM mask. MLM (mask) means there are probably few thousands of chips from few wafers.
The same MLM mask will be used for the production run. Assuming 25 production run wafers produce 1PH/s in chips, the engineering run with 6 wafers generated > 200TH/s. The only reason the chips are not online yet would be that there are no boards for it.
2. (purely hypothetical) when producing chips with MLM masks there is some small area on the wafers left that can be used for other designs (something like MPW on an MLM wafer ???). Maybe this would generate only few chips.

Just because they taped out in October does not mean they had the chips in hand in October.

Of course. They have chips since January maybe. Still, I wonder how many :-)
Of course the GH/s value per chip is also not so important. More important is GH/s per wafer or GH/s per die area AND GH/joule [if possible at different voltage levels].

This surprises the shit out of me.


Somebody, tell me how an entity can invest so much time and money into developing a product, but doesn't know a damn thing about their direct competition. Seriously, you couldn't (you forgot that accent thingy) tell if Avalon and BFL are real or not? How about spending a little more time researching, read reading this forum.

Granted, I applaud your efforts, but something doesn't smelling right here. The other two companies are not using your product because it's still in development, hence you coming to board to see if there's a market for a product you're considering developing.

~Bruno K~

Are you sure that he isn't talking about the recent announcements like PrimeASIC as opposed to the products that were announced and documented a half year ago like Avalon and BFL?

Of course he is talking about the recent scamsics. He seems to make a point of not naming competitors ever, but clearly this is not about BFL or avalon, but about primeasic and two others who's name I dont recall.

As for him being online for 59 minutes; maybe if Josh hadnt spent half his time on this and his own forum the past 6 months, BFL would be shipping by now?  :)

And then there is the scale thing. If that company is a large one, they couldn't care less about some BFL let alone Avalon. They could throw a few $100K around just for laughs, and see if their chip actually worked / had some market.

I don't know any company that throws a few hundred K around just for laughs. These days big & small companies count every penny even more than they did in the past. Share holders have been burnt by the GFC and are screaming for profits and share price increases.

However I see where you are going-they have the resources to do a study on what they could make, and the business case. Some might even have good manufacturing costs they can leverage to make entry easier. But no big business will start a project with out a profitable business case, and it has to be more profitable than other projects they could invest that R&D in.

I'm hoping somebody quite large takes on these 28Nm ASICs. Somebody with nice low PCB manufacturing and assembly costs who can deliver in volume. Down side is that smart business means they will only slightly under cut BFL etc in cost for performance, but we would still get quality ASICs with a steady supply.
I'm also looking forward to different applications for these chips. PCI-E card based ASICs, all in one CPU motherboard with ASICs lined all over the board, server rack systems.

So next week is the first "press release" with target performance and the names of the chosen integrators??

For a second there, Mr. Teal, I was sweatin' bullets, thinking that I was in error, but...


Compare the above with the below (gleaned from the OP of this thread).


That's what I'm in reference to. They imply that they have limited knowledge of other ASIC-based bitcoin mining outfits, yet are going to develop 28nm chips to directly compete with the competition, that they don't know anything and everything about.

They clearly have a command of the English language, yet constantly make simple grammatical errors. Did I not get the memo that proofreading is no longer in vogue?

True, they're not coming here asking for funds, but I do wonder what's being asked of those behind closed doors. And if that's the case, then I'll have to admit that I like them, for at least they're scamming outside the BT box.

It seems to me they are saying they know nothing of lightening, prime, and russian/chinese ASICs which people have likely been asking. I don't think they mean they have no idea what BFL or Avalon are doing-they have said their chips will out perform other offerings, so that suggests they know what is out there soon will be.

They have also said they will provide specs and test boards to selected integrators who have signed up with an NDA. SO hard to scam somebody when you have sent them a reference board to study.

Hopefully they release more info next week and plenty of proof. I think these guy will come good with product.

Im counting on this and waiting for with the great interest more info - hopefully they will be able to get good integrators and we´ll see new products by the summer.

Concur, with apologies. There's so much shit going around lately, that...

But that's no excuse for my actions in this regard.

~Bruno K~

Go easy on yerself Bruno...you've spotted AT LEAST 20 of the last ten scammers str8 away! ;)

This is a multiple choice question. You are a manager in a reputable company that would like to remain reputable. Please choose which one of the following statements you could imagine saying publicly:

A) BFL is a scam.
B) BFL is real.
C) We have nothing to comment about our competitors.

same here, looking forward to hearing more information - not necessarily from helveticoin, but from the business partners.

+1  ;D

+2

this project certainly seems more reputable than the rest of the recent offerings. Helveticoin seems to actually have a clue and a business plan - stick to what you know, bring on partners with expertise, etc.

and please, the term "scamsics" is just dumb. I propose fakesics or fAkeSIC.

Summer 2013... my guess.

When should we expect the official release with the integrators?

The "USB-ASIC" thread shows a cool idea. Single chip on a tiny PCB USB board. A 28nm chips could get maybe 8ghs compared to BFLs 4.5. Maybe more with a small heat sink and a decent hub with good current flow

@everyone sending forum messages and emails;
I apologize for not answering each and every one, we do read them all and we will contact most of you when the time is right.  We've made a few very good contacts and we will concentrate on those first, to make sure we are not wasting your and our time. We do not want anyone else to commit time or resources before we have finished our incorporation and signed a deal with the fab and some IP owners.

@Phinnaeus Gage
We are quite aware of our actual competition (Butterflylabs, Avalon,..) , but we are unfamiliar with the companies behind some other recent announcements that are suspected hoaxes. Many people asked us if we had any relation with them, I just wanted to make clear that we do not know them and they are not using our chips.

@tytus
The answer is your number 2. It is both a MLM and MPW, the mask containing several test structures and designs for customers and our bitcoin miner. Because of this, we only had a relatively small number of candidates to begin with, and since this node was/is experimental, our yields, especially on the first wafers were much, much lower than usual. Only the last few wafers yielded reasonably and as a result we have on the order of a dozen functional chips.

@Magnate
We will come out with a press release once all legal hurdles are taken and the deals are inked. I cant give a precise date for that, I do hope its within the next few weeks.

As for the performance estimates; we wanted to remain tight lipped about this to not steal our partners thunder, but since they actually press us to get some more info out, I will give you some. Our design contains 64 SHA256 engines (at least 60 are expected to be operational in each chip). Maximum clock frequency of our samples, depending on voltage, ranges between 1 and >2 GHz. Power consumption per chip is in the 5-15W range.

Couple questions, if you will.
Does each engine produce one Bitcoin double SHA2 hash per clock cycle?

Also, have any of your first round partners met with you in person and seen a live demonstration of your hardware?

Of course, otherwise your future customers will spend all their money on Avalon now :-)
Assuming SHA256 engine computes a single sha256 function You would get 30-60GH/s and use 5-15W for this. This is a little bit worse than our estimations for standard ST CMOS and the rolled design. So I assume You did not use any of the new processes advertised by ST (FDSOI / body bias). But still getting the clock tree right for such a big structure is a nice achievement :-)
I still don't understand Your statement about the high chip costs. You don't want to create a real mask set for the chip and continue with the MLM-MPW mask? I don't think this is a good strategy. By the time the chips enter the market the price per chip will be probably in the order of $2 per GH/s => $60-120 for Your chips. If You get only few chips per wafer this price would be too low. I would invest in a full mask especially since these chips will survive on the market much longer than the competing chips.

Our first partner has had a working prototype for almost as long as we have. The second prospective partner only has documentation atm, we have not signed with them yet.

And yes, one dual iterated hash per clock.

No, it does a double hash.


You are incorrectly assuming the production wafers would contain only a small number of bitcoin asics. They will contain only bitcoin chips, using the same mask, but shielding everything we dont need.

Getting 60GH/s with 5Watt is a very good result ! :-)

holly $#!+
one chip pulling 60-120ghs and 15W?!? That is way better than I had guessed. I was going for 64 cores, but not that frequency or that low a power consumption.

Cooling requirements should be tiny too. Just a small 1" square heat sink and fan would more than do for a high speed/power version. And the boards will be tiny with the SD slots and OI taking up most the realestate.

Thanks for the info Helveticoin. I'll be in the market for some mining equipment in a couple of months, now I know what I'm saving for (just need a price!)

Count me in as very interested in this!!!!

I would encourage You to consider talking to BFL also (in addition to Avalon). It is not in my interest but the BTC community invested in the BFL project millions of USD. It would be a shame if this goes up in smoke as bASIC did.

It would also be a shame if the emergence of a new player in the ASIC market doesn't lead to more competition and more vendors to choose from.  This is a golden opportunity for vendors to emerge who have short order to delivery times and for the now ridiculous never-ending pre-order saga to die a far overdue death.  It would be a shame if it's squandered on merely reinforcing the status quo.

+1

IOW it'd be nice if we could bring a bit of professionalism into the market.

Where's the pc board diagram scheme?

You should probably read the thread instead of skimming it looking for PCB pics.

I read it, I can't start manufacturing process of pc boards using their new chips without a diagram.

You should probably read the thread.

What the hack, I'll just have to wait for an open source diagram and for chips to show up in catalog. Same as it went with the fpga systems.

BTW, I have contacted them, no answer, same as with primeasic.

The reason I ask every time for a diagram is simple, diagram without chips is useless yet it is proof that the company is serious. Until someone provides an independent confirmation of a working device or a diagram scheme, that company should be treated as irrelevant to the market.

Just a question to OP: Do you follow the general consensus of bitcoin community that do not let any single entity acquire more than 10% of the total hash power of the network?

They're wholesaling chips.  How on earth can they control how much hashing power an end user acquires?  Even if individual vendors limit the amount of hashing power they'll sell to a customer, people can order from multiple vendors and they can acquire additional units on the secondary market. 

When you say it does a 'double hash'
1. Does it do a double hash and compare, or just a double hash....
2. Are the I/O pins parallel or Serial.

Great news. Plz keep this thread up to date. I would like to get one when its ready. The tinier the better!

Will be watching this career with great interest!

[subbed]

U SHOLD CONTACT BFL IM SURED THEY SCAM U AND RUN INTO THE GROUND OR BRING SOME TO MARKET BY 2016

After seeing both Avalon and BFL's power consumption, I strongly doubt the claim of 60GH/15W for 28nm process, seems even 30W is a best case scenario

How many gates did you used to create each double sha core?
Thanks

They've asked nobody for money as far as I can tell.  I think your trigger finger is a little itchy there fella.

Any info yet as to the "official" announcements?

OP seems legit-.

**This is a speculation post, NOT a scam accusation post. Shit, even the word scam is way overused and misused in this forum.**

I can also write a very professional post like that. The question is:
Did anyone contact him representing potential system integrators? No one has said anything one way or the other. So either no one has or there is some kind of NDA on even mentioning you talked to him? What's really going on here?

Posting on the Bitcoin forum is odd for a company looking for systems integrators for their chips. But not entirely unlikely. I see 3 possibilities:

1. Everything is as helveticoin says. This would be very interesting and certainly change things regarding miners who have pre-purchased ASICs from other companies. Even with them onboard, I expect to be able to make 0.1BTC/day with a 60GH/s unit by the end of the year. They claim a lot of PH/s but I can't see there being enough orders for them in the volume they can produce right off the bat. I do expect them to start a slow network increase past the initial spike. But they seem to be hoping to get the chips off their hands quickly so... (speculation time)
What I get from the first post is that this is a group of people who abused their control over the 28nm wafers from GF while working at ST Microelectronics to design and produce bitcoin ASICs. They have now left the company and brought the "stolen" chips with them. They are now forming a new one: A company who wants to sell the chips they got while working there to people who will do the systems integration and resale. In other words, they want to get rid of the chips relatively quickly and make money on it. I think they will try to get rid of their stock and produce nothing past that.

2. Someone was bored and can actually speak English properly and be professional.

3. This is a well thought out and long term scam that will start with initial rumours mainly brought on by this thread, further developments and lead to multiple fully-believable companies selling fake ASICs by June. I guess it is a good idea because they can claim they don't need pre-orders here but when it comes down to it, they can have the other fake reseller companies be the ones to ask for preorders.

Questions:

MLM is advertised as a cost-saving measure so why is helveticoin claiming this will increase their costs?
MLM saves mask costs ("mask" is done already) but increases chip costs.

Why did they come to bitcointalk?

Has anyone actually discussed being a systems integrator with them from this forum?

Has anyone sent any "serious inquiries" by email as helveticoin asked and received a response?

</long post with lots of speculation, questions and skepticism>

So now we wait until May.

Until someone actually asks for money it would be premature to even consider this as a scam candidiate.

We can take a closer look if/when the integrators start putting up their finished products for sale.

We need a label like "the boy who cried wolf" as much as we need a "scammer" tag.

They probably need to negotiate with their employer (most likely ST partner that offers MPW ... there is 1) the terms of spinning off the chip. This can take an unpredictable amount of time and this could be a reason for delay.

MLM saves mask costs ("mask" is done already) but increases chip costs.

I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm raising questions and speculating.

Hey, you're just asking questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZAuTDVuD7o&t=1m26s

After some thinking and watching the BTC price go through the roof helveticoin decided to change the technology exploitation plan and go for solo mining :-) mediocre revenues from chip sales do not justify the bureaucracy of a Swiss GmBH :-)
=> we will have no more updates
=> we will see the 28nm chip on network hash-rate charts in August :-)

Thank goodness by then the expect network "difficulty" will become a factor in their speculative calculations.

Is this a joke or a confirmed fact?

A confirmed joke of course :-)

Any news from Helveticoin?

Should be in May.

May 11th any updates?

Seemingly not. In the meantime, here is the exact quote, as on page 2, for easier reference:


Also from page 4:

What you think they're trying to scam technical information from engineers?

Looking forward to this.

Still no updates from helveticoin? 

Hmmm... I'm wondering about the KnCminer and ORSoC partnership....

So what's up helveticoin?  Any news yet?

helveticoin is absent without leave ;D

They said that we have to wait until June

It is now June.  Time for an update.

Bump.  What happened to helveticoin? 

An update would be nice.  Even if it's only "all deals fell through, there will be no product".

Bump.