Update
Sorry for the delay in my awakening. Doing management on troubleshooting all day.
This update is sketchy but I will try making contact more frequently than once a week whenever I have time.

Deploying
The speed of current deploying is indeed a concern, especially in this high time that both price and hashrates seem to be on an uptrend. We are as eager as every shareholder else.

The first batch is more or less a prototype for the second one, so the deploying process is also the period we are finding the right solution to large-scale mining farms. In this batch the work is split as follows:

Factories:
  Wafer production, Slicing and packaging, PCB production, PCB assembly, Delivery.
Inhouse by us and our partners/employees/temps:
  Cabling for the power supply (double to triple digit kW needs special modification of the cable system), Wiring solution, Heat dissipation solution, Subrack and rack assembly, Network and firmware/software solution, System managing.

For the next batch, things will be much more smooth and automatic because the work will be like:
Factories:
  Wafer production, Slicing and packaging, PCB production, PCB assembly, Wiring, Subrack and rack assembly.
Inhouse by us and our partners/employees/temps:
  Cabling for the power supply, System managing.

The deploying of the next batch will be boosted with their "normal speed" as well, since most of the factories which had been at hibernation during the long vacation are fully functional now. We are also building a team, preparing for the real scaled deploying.

Financials
(This is brief and imprecise, to be replaced by a spreadsheet)
Assets
 Fiat balance: ~86,000 rmb
 Creditor's rights: 1066.71 btc + interest
 Fixed assets: ~1,420,000 rmb
Liabilities
 Non urgent private loan: 150,000 rmb + interest, due: July 2013
 Non urgent bank loan: 120,000 rmb + interest, due: post 2013
 Non urgent private loan: 90,000 rmb, due: July 2013

Platform
Sorry because many shareholders and potential shareholders want more liquidity than what are currently on the auction board. But currently there are only limited manhours allocated on it and safety/bugfree guarantee is more important than in-time online. On the other hand, the time does not allow us to explore and investigate existing platforms for a temporary place. The new platform is kind of innovative and is very interesting in its own right, but the status quo may last for a while.

The market will find a way to increase liquidity by other financial mechanisms, we have no way to stop them. But from our side, we are only responsible for our direct shareholders (who really hold ASICMINER shares, not derivatives of any form).

Power consumption
On our final products our chip consumes 6-8 watts/G on rated depending on temperature and voltage. After reviewing and comparison it turns out that our result is already very good with standard cell based design and 130nm tech.

Pre-Update

First week's dividends paid. Total sum 3860.41091438. This is all mining revenue minus the paid urgent debts and reserves.

I cannot hold myself from some sleep. We will explain the status of our project, how we are going to improve the deploying speed for the second batch, and give a public brief financial information after that. If I could get up before Feb 28. 11:59:59 PM forum time it will still be a Thursday update.

Test Payment

This is a test payment of 1satoshi per share for seeing if everything is correct.
Please look at the following transactions and see if your confirmed address with
your ASICMINER shares is included:

e774f151176f2ab04063a04d57f7573f8f22ce934757893c543959f5b8918e64

1b84755710c2e43b8a397ca7eab0c718a2c96fa2141fa9bc81dcd76f0d14e753

1a0d8fc75d77ac94cc22d9d2bffa60739012a1582291dffb2ff7c6791ce15b7c

47442b0198456ba6b8184897b0774f9788bb904b41c8f57065264b55d55e727a

ed88db7fcc011f31ea1cc701f76708b6cff37fd83dcf53245013e0450aacd9c9

21ae1a92ff3e288fd97b26a5d2cee8e820419f5c5f08160f7b99a30e9195e001

We prove that lagmo indeeed holds 215 ASICMINER shares.

For the winners of the auction:

Please PM or mail me (fnnirvana@gmail.com) with your forum id, your e-mail address and your Bitcoin address. Thanks.

The transferring has been processed. To make the database more complete, the owners of following addresses could PM me with your e-mail address.

*)   100 to address 1AXKZp4KU4tA4yPoFtHQPHoUi2DmWgHdEd
*)   200 to address 1ZKrazKLvfxNCYqk4BbboxiPonB9U3Pwh
*)   100 to address 1Bgu2w4vBTXDDkpWkjAeomVnRRYASnCaJV

The transfer will be done after the payments are confirmed.

Transfer processed.

Update

Progress
The deploying is on its track. It's slowing down because we have been doing a new round of preparation. The reason why the first 3T went online so quickly, is that we did a lot of work during the unexpected delay of assembling delivery.

We are currently putting all of our hashpower on btcguild. We will split the hashpower (if/when) other major pools make corresponding adaptions to very large workloads in the next week. We tested on other pools but it seems that they had difficulty setting being a bottleneck for such a flood of hashpower at that time.

Self-mining is an option but not emergent plan. Besides having fluctuation and being the target for cyber attack, we do not want to be involved in voting with our portion of the network yet.

The original timeline is to deploy everything before March, but as our next order of wafers are going to be out of fab sooner than expected, the deploying of first and second batch will be closely one by one and we will be busy till all of them are online (and of course will still busy afterwards with new-gen chips).

Financials
The Bitcoin mined from the start are already more than enough to pay the urgent expenses and debts. Dividend payment will start in next Thursday. To avoid the time conflict of trading and dividend payment, please stop/delay the trading requests during Feb 28, 2013, 00:00:00 to Feb 28, 2013, 23:59:59 (forum time) so we can process all of older trading requests before the payment.

And please, make confirmation to me (friedcat on forum, or fnnirvana@gmail.com by mail) after the trade is finished.

The second public financial brief (first one was in last year) will also be given with the dividend payment. Here is what in our mind for achieving the transparency of financials:

Dividend payment: weekly on the blockchain, with the transaction id being public.
Pubic balance sheet: per quarter (fourth a year).
Balance sheet for shareholders: per month, or on demand by board members.
Income and expense details for board members: on demand, after the accountant is ready.
Auditing: sent by board members on demand. Also, professional auditing organizations may be invited in the future when seeking new investments.

All confirmation letters had been sent more than one month ago. Please check your spam folder if you did not find it. And please PM/mail me if you still could not.

Update

Dear shareholders,

I am sorry for update late. I just got up from some sleep.

Most of what are going on have been asked by replies to this thread. So we start with them:

As we stated in earlier updates, the chips for next expansion (6-fold one, >50TH/s) are ordered and being produced in the fab already.

We are about to get the wafer in the early-to-mid next month. We did that with instalments and paid the premium by loans. The due of whole payment should be before they send us the wafers. It should not be hard to pay off the order, with reserving from our current deployment.

We will update the brief financials report and our plan of payment structures in later this thread. Any concerns about our approach are welcome.

This is what in our mind when doing the IPO:

1. One ASICMINER (A) share is one privileged share of our partnership (A+B) compared to Bitfountain (B) shares controlled by us founders.

2. The privileges (investor protection) are exactly the four ones listed in the main thread. Besides privileges, one ASICMINER share is no different to one Bitfountain share. This means that ASICMINER shareholders also pay for maintainance and re-investment, same as the rest of us three, while at the same time also enjoy the future benefits made possible from the maintainance and re-investment costs. This is why we stated that ASICMINER shareholders are always in a better position than any device buyers when the initial biggest risk disappeared.

3. The rest shares, when not sold, are kept and owned by Bitfountain. When they are sold, all income will be invested in our partner ship (A+B). This is what the non-dilution privilege of ASICMINER share means. They may be sold someday when the price is right and we need really big investment costs. But now the price is not fully appreciated in our point of view and the re-investment cost in the mid-term won't be so big that we have to sell them low.

4. About the portion concerns, we believe that the evaluation of (A+B) on IPO is fair to ASICMINER purchasers, because it's already much lower than most other startups seeking for angel investments. The investor protection clauses are also a pro. Of course, most angels/VCs will get more information and control, but we could still debate whether this aspect can neutralize the advantages from low evaluation and privileges.

Picture taken last week.


Failure rate <5%. Clock rate 336MHz not overclocked.

It's only a fraction of our total hashrate. Just 2TH/s on btcguild is not bringing centralization. The future of difficulty or our portion is unclear to us. If we are really lucky enough to be able to take a large percentage for a long time, we are the last ones who would like to see panics. Decentralization could be achieved by scattering some of our future computation power to consumers, or letting many different pools with different interests control them and use them for good.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The next part is about what will happen:

Sample boards to the community: this is at the 2nd order of our priority list following deploying. Once we have enough time it will be done immediately.

The next batch: Chips are arranged by the fab to arrive next month. With the former efforts on PCB design/service seeking of the first batch, the development time of the second batch of final products should be shorter than this one. With them to expand our farm, or sell them, or do both, are still in consideration.

Trading: The platform is still in its testing cycle. Private trades are entitled when registering in our place by PM or e-mailing me. Please do it in larger quantities and lower frequency because we cannot handle too much requests in time especially in this period.

Financials and dividend plan: We are to make the final payment in early March for the next batch of wafers. We are also in some urgent and some not-so-urgent payment dues.

Urgent
* Final payment: 382,982.4 rmb + possibly some overdue fine
* Urgent private loans: 35,000 rmb
* Urgent salary payments: ~7,000 rmb
* Budget for the full deploying of the whole rest chips (upgrade of cooling/place/mechanical parts since it gets warmer when spring comes and reserves for the maintainance/rents/electricity bill generated during it): 70,000 rmb

Not-so-urgent
* Packaging, PCB manufacturing and assembly cost of the second round
* Not-so-urgent loans: 370,000 rmb + interests (which should be reduced with our part of debt to the company, because that GLBSE owes us money and we turned it to our debt to the company + GLBSE debt to us)

This is the order of payment in our plan. Please criticize and help us with a better solution if you like:

First, do the urgent payments and reserves.

Second, make payments sole to ASICMINER shareholders till they break even nominated in Bitcoins, with all what we mined, as required in the (You Break Even First) privilege clause.

Third, make regular dividend payments after ASICMINER shareholders break even. Some net profits are kept for future development, such as next batch, the way towards 65nm/45nm/better technology, and development of consumer mining devices. What in our mind is keeping 20%-40% for growth and paying 60%-80% as dividends.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to all investors to make it happen.

We are very very proud and thankful of our engineering team, especially the PCB/whole solution engineer who worked with us in partnership. Without you the delay and uncertainty may already have kept us from moving forward.

Though our evaluation of risk is not high, luck still plays an important role to bring us to what we are in now. However, (luckily) the importance of luck would dramatically be reduced in the future, because MPW and all other time-consuming verification stages will be done in the next times.

Pre Update

The deploying is in process. We are stress testing on btcguild with a portion of  our devices. The current computation power is close to 2TH/s.

We have been working day and night and still are. The real update will be given in a few hours.

Update

Deploying has been consuming the time of all us devoted into this project in last week and this one. During the busy days we made us some spare time taking a few pictures:

Peeping over one of our subracks:


Four of them waiting to populate on racks:


Please stay tuned for the *really* good news since our chips arrived. And sorry if there's delay
in replying forum PMs or e-mails. When the most busy time is over the communication should
resume more active.

The rest shares unsold is indeed owned by the partner (not so "parent" since ASICMINER owns the voting right). They will unlikely be sold in near- or mid-term.

Update

We are on our revised timeline, and are about to deploy 800 hashing boards in early February. The picture down below is the QC device we are about to take to the assembling service before we pick up all the assembled boards tomorrow:

small:


large:


The board on the upper-left is the power supply module. The upper-right one is the back side of the hashing board with VM connectors and heatsinks attached on. The bottom-left one is the front side of the hashing board without DIP components or heatsinks. The bottom-right one is the tester for QC, and it will be replaced by the controller board in real use.

A more detailed update is given to the board. Please note that the board member list has met its first adjustment, removing shareholders who hold much less than 5,000 after the initial offering from the board.

Update

All confirmations including GLBSE-only ones (who haven't claimed to us) have been sent. For shareholders who haven't received any, please check your spam folder, and report to us if you still couldn't find them.

Considering the yield rate (including chips themselves, assembling, and other uncertainties) and the overclocking opportunity we are looking at over 10TH/s and under 12TH/s for the whole first batch and sixfold for the second.

[quote bitcoinmagazine]
Normally, computer chip manufacturing facilities produce a “yield” of 95% – that is, less than 5% of the chips that come out of the foundry are imperfect in some way. For ASICMiner’s chip production, the company’s customer service representative reported, the number of failed chips is as high as 30%. In theory, all this means is that the manufacturer will need to make 43% more chips to compensate, but the abnormality hints at the possibility of other problems to come.
[/quote]
We have to make clear that that we have said was that our fab considers <1/3 failed rate as OK and they won't take responsibility, which is their bottom line. The reality is that our yield rate also >95%. The whole number of chips were less than what we expected was caused by the MLM typed process used for making our masks utilizes less area than a full mask.

1. No surprising things has come up. The real hold up is that we are meeting the delay of the assembly service which is an automated process which is practically hard to "push".
2. Because we have made many adjustments on the heat solution during the last few weeks and negated many as improper ones for bulk-ordering. They are done in parallel with the first the (mass) packaging of chips and then the (mass) production of pcbs so this was not the part that wasted time.
3. Yes. But we ordered them after the physical tests are done.

The current status is that in estimation we will be delayed by about 2 weeks in total compared to what we projected when the chips arrive. That is early Feb, before the CNY vacation comes. The next "real" milestone worth announcing is that we start hashing in our workshop, but before that we will also keep you updated.

No, not ready yet. Whenever they are ready we couldn't wait till a "regular" update time to announce it...

We are sorry to shareholders that we are now >2-month delayed against the original plan. (Late Dec. against Late Oct. to get the chips, plus 4-5 weeks against 2-3 weeks to fully deploy). The status are resulted in by a mix of our optimistic projection, our conservative action and our un-developed relation in the electric manufacturing field. Thanks again for all shareholders' patience and we will keep the track of deploying, and improve our timeline with the lessons of this time in our later products.

The resuming of payment already started in the last week (2013-01-17 11:30:39). This is the first one, with all accumulated coupons (0.0366847BTC per share):
https://blockchain.info/tx/28f804a3d97298d413575712cb5413c07b098813e1f5f90ec1c8dd941dce47ab
here is the test payment that is 1 satoshi per transaction before the real payment:
https://blockchain.info/tx/29b1864321a918bc7b8c5d243f095a4fe8e1572db2a2e6786b98c802712638ec
The total number is 2754-26=2728. With the two different shareholders with 26 shares in total. Their GLBSE data only holds e-mail address and share number. We haven't successfully contacted yet for addresses.

The difference between 3958 and 2728 is our bought-back shares with another account before GLBSE shut down.

As an overdue fine, the hashrate per share in all weeks is also increased to the last week's instead gradually increasing per week.

The receiving addresses are based on the GLBSE data, with ~10 changed to the e-mail I received as confirmation of preferring the address claimed to us.

The re-listing will be done at the same time of ASICMINER's. And of course before that, weekly coupons are already stated paying, so they will be paid like the transaction like the above transactions.

Sorry for delaying. It's (1) regardless of X. Its downside of is that the portion is less than (2) and (3) somehow. While the upside is that it will not go diluted when later investments come in because it's always 1/400,000 no matter how Bitfountain itself gets diluted.

Update

What happened last week:

1. Workshop with sufficient power supply and cables for mining farm settled.
2. Solution of mechanical parts such as heatsinks done and products bulk-ordered.
3. The mass production (second batch) of the chips starts in the fab.
4. The rest 6 wafers finished and in the QC stage.
5. Waiting for all the main boards assembled with chips and components done.

We would like to say that the shareholders of ASICMINER are always in a better place now, than device users. because while  the everlasting free upgrade from providers for users is not possible, all our future products will benefit our shareholders. Thanks to all shareholders for taking the risks with/for us as investors in the beginning of our project. Higher risks are almost always rewarded with higher returns when the risks are eliminated. Now the biggest risks have gone so please expect the enjoying of both short-term and long-term profits of us in the next years. And also thanks for your patience.

The deploying with the whole 12 wafers may take more than two weeks. But everything is progressing well and no exceptions happened. We will make more frequent updates when any new milestones are hit.

Of course. Just like ASICMINER, the GLBSE data finally added up to the original sum of share number, so it would be the basis of the calculation.

Update

In fact we have two pcbs. One for testing and one for mining. The latter is also a demo-version with respect to the first batch, because besides mining it will be used for profiling (mainly heat dissipation) to make our mass production stage better. The pcbs for testing are single-chip ones that are not modular, but it's simple enough that we could make hand fixes when anything goes wrong. It helped us much in determining and fixing a lot of small problems.

While the pcb for mining inhabits many chips, and are modular in a sense that controllers and dc/dc adapters are pluggable and replaceable. They should be are a being assembled with chips and other components by our assembly service with outsourcing contracts.

What we have done in the past week:

1. Making order and sending the pcbs, chips and other components to the assembly service.
2. Negotiating for the final renting contracts with workshop-typed land providers.
3. Dealing with mechanical parts (mining device holders, heatsinks, fans and air-conditioning).
4. Placing the mass production order to the chip foundry and making the first part of payment.
5. Getting noticed that the rest 6 wafers of the first batch in the foundry have only 6 layers left.

Thanks for all shareholders' patience and we are also very eager to have our devices mining. The service for pcb mass production and assembly has a very effective production line and responds very quickly to us, thanks to the glow competition of small and medium electronic businesses in Shenzhen.

In addition, if we are lucky enough, other current and potential mining device producers, if they ever have any step of production outsourced to Chinese businesses, will be delayed by the Chinese New Year (Feb. 10). It will be a long vacation (typically 7 days, plus a prior week and a succeeding week of low working efficiency from holiday syndrome and some of the employees' annual vacation-New Year vacation requirements).

Update

Sorry for a long period before last update but the ASICMINER project has taken most of the time and energy. The weekly payment of dividends will resume in 16th, Jan. 2013 in forum time, all confirmations will be before it.

Part luck, part conservative stock-picking, all our holding assets survived the GLBSE mess. They now live on different platforms and we gained back the control of our corresponding shares during the last two months.

MU will stay as my personal contract to shareholders. There will be neither termination nor expansion in the foreseeable future. As ASICMINER will continue to eat my focus, sorry but please expect a gradual buy-back and a semi-fixed portfolio.