We are designing a version of crowd funding that encompasses not only the financial side of it but also the control, ownership, and contribution components as well.


My observation as well.

The corporate design I will propose will eliminate the trust component/requirement and steer/guide the company in the communities desired direction.

My estimates are to bring a chip to tapeout will cost a bargain basement 1-2 million.

Yes, am working on that now.

My belief as well. This endeavor will require administration, finance, development, production, and PR teams/departments/divisions at the least.


All of the aforementioned teams/departments/divisions will need project management skills to stay on track. Much like the skill set a construction site manager uses only not with 2x4's, concrete, steel, etc. The things one is/are managing are different but the concepts are the same. And both subsets manage human capitol (probably the most important project asset).


Nothing is an unacceptable compensation amount. As it relegates an individual's effort into the classification of hobby. Can't speak for everyone but my hobbies change, sometimes abruptly. My business and business interests span the test of time. If for no other reason than my obligations to others. Hobbies are self centered, obligations to communities (like companies, BTC community, etc.) are externally oriented.

I envision the compensation to manifest itself in the form of dividends, paid in fiat or BTC, with timing and in amounts determined by voting stakeholders. This timing and amounts may be proposed by any stakeholder at any time to be voted on by all stakeholders regardless of the quantity of ownership. i.e. every dollar contributed gets one vote.

If successful, I can envision a time where, for lack of better words, capital non-voting stock might be offered.

Now if I'm going to get this concept/proposal out in the next couple of days I need to get back to it. But thanks for the distraction, I needed it.

Holy crap, are you sneaking around in my brain? Just kidding.

We actually were planning pretty much exactly what you're describing. Multiple circuit designs on the same die, so if one or more designs is FUBAR the run is not for naught. 2 of the designs I can talk about. The third is sooooooo patentable, sooooo simple, and will appeal to such a broad market that this simple concept will make everyone display the "wow I coulda' had a V8" look (in addition to being an interesting method of nonce selection).

So the 2 circuits I am willing to identify are the hash circuit and a simple (read inexpensive) USB 3.0 -> SPI/I2C version of the popular CP2102.

"The reason why hardly anyone is doing it is because of the personality issues and general instability of Bitcoin mining entrepreneurs."
Is an issue I noticed here years ago, "creative differences" or motivations. The technologically creative fight amongst themselves and all the techies fight with the business types (bean counters). Been there, done that, on both sides of the aisle. Additionally what I noticed was that the entities that have managed to survive (the current "big 4") have stable, albeit classic, business models (my second degree was in business admin). Over the last week I've been brain working on a model of an entity that "plays more fairly" with the creative geniuses, allows the "every man" to participate to their respective pain threshold, presents an attractive investment to VC's, can "shift gears" quickly, is totally transparent, and has the administrative and cash controls in place to protect all vested interests (be that IP or $$$).

Your input of the NDA's required by a foundry threw me for a loop, but I think I ironed that one out and the solution will be satisfactory to all concerned.

Currently am working on a document/Power Point Presentation that I'll make public for perusal and comment (which is solicited and desired). Should have it done sometime by the end of the first week in August. Undoubtedly, there'll be some tweaking (maybe major tweaking), but the current plan is to start the entity creation process end of the 2nd week of Aug and be formalized/created by the end of the third week. Sometime during August I'll quit cluttering up sidhack's thread, thanks bro', and if acceptable launch a new thread.

At this juncture I'd like to give a shout out to the sponsor of bitcointalk, PIA and thank them for allowing us to be here and participate.

sidehack - that tabletop PnP you ordered is SWEET!, now if the pricks would just get it to ya' . . . . . Might be worth it next time to take a brief vacation to China, bring it back as carry on luggage, and walk it through customs as a demo unit.

Gotta' run, more l8r.

Wow, that's a lot to digest. It'll take me a few days to chew on all the references. But REALLY appreciate your taking the time to weed through stuff.
Obviously there are some road blocks. The real question looming in my mind is 1) Can this get done in time and 2) in the process of doing it will the entity be forced or coerced into falling into the big 4's business model by economic realities.

If it were easy to do, everybody would be doing it.

I got burned by BFL to the tune of ~$4,000.

I hate the hassle and delays of importation. Dealing with companies that are not subject to the laws of the destination country is bogus.

Please don't blow a gasket in the heat over the P'n'P we need you too much (selfish little bastards aren't we).

Your call on the thread.
I have 0 experience moderator - ing.

Simply stated, if the community (of which I'd like to think we're a part) designs the chip, then the community owns the design (all the stuff one forwards to a foundry to get a run made). Put it up on GitHub. GPL licensed open source hardware? In theory, anyone could take that design and have a foundry make'm a batch. Much like an individual D/L's source compiles it and runs it. Given H/W is a little different as most can't afford a "foundry compiler" but a group might be able to pool resources and have a run made. And this community has pulled together in the past to make things happen.

Our primary goal is to facilitate the availability to the community (big and small, whomever) a ready supply of high quality state-of-the-art raw materials regardless of whom the seller may be. Might be us, might be Gekkoscience, might be Bitmain, might be Bob & Ted's Really Cool Chip Company, might be a group buy, etc. . . . . . Because in the past and present a slim few have controlled the flow of raw materials. Kinda' like DeBeer's does with diamonds. Throttling the volume to maintain an artificially inflated price. The business rationalization is "We paid for the design, it belongs to us, we're the only game in town, and we'll charge what the market will bear." Even the playing field, and that model collapses.

With an even playing field, margins will be what margins will be. Typically, the larger the field the smaller the margins. If we expand the playing field, margins will take care of themselves.

As an example, I offer what happened to PC's. In the early 80's IBM was the only supplier. In 1981 an IBM 5150 PC with two 360K floppies was $25,000 (from IBM's Entry Level Systems Division). By the late 80's there was a plethora of brands/suppliers (I bought a Kaypro in 86 during this era) and the price had dropped to $1200 with a 20meg MFM HD (IBM PCXT clone). With a little brains one could buy the parts and assemble one themselves for less than $1000.

So as long as hash chips remain propriety they'll be priced outta' this world. Standardize the design and . . . .
I think this is an achievable goal given the industry has bumped into the 12-14nm concrete wall, SHA-256 circuitry is about as optimized as it can get, and fabricating ASIC's is common place.
Let the community set the standard not corporations.

In brief, this is what (a supplier) we (PlanetCrypto or a spin off LLC) are seriously investigating.
I'll be the first to admit that chip design is not a skill set I possess. In fact, one might say I'm clueless in that regard.
I do know that it is a skill set that can be learned, acquired, and worst case bought and with the guidance and brilliance available here I believe it's a doable thing.
I also believe that with a looming block reward decrease and serious talks about increasing block size to 20 Mb, little miners are doomed.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/23/bitcoins-war-could-threaten-its-survival.html
This is not something that I believe is a healthy direction for the Bitcoin ecosystem to travel down. But WTF do I know anyway.

Since none of the "big 4" chip makers have any decent chips/boards/miners available, an opportunity to fulfill that need exists.
And if we're gonna "take the plunge" I'm in favor of "doing it right".

Will we get a chip to tape out?
Only time will tell.
But since no one else seems to be pursuing it, we're gonna' give it a shot.
If we fail to tape out a hash chip then at least the "brain working" will be completed for a "next gen" hash chip that another entity could "pick up the ball and run with".

For us as a company the timing is synergistic as we have 2 other chip designs in the conceptual stage of development.
We own some of the physical assets necessary (a small computing farm most notably) to get through the design/simulation process.
Our current plan is to concentrate on the hash chip first because it's the most time constrained and in the "dead spots" of getting that chip to tape out move forward on the other 2 designs.

And at the risk of alienating potential participants, I also believe it's about time for an American supplier (who is the antithesis of BFL) to enter the mix.

Not trying to be caustic, just figured we'd justify/clarify why we're cluttering up sidehack's thread.

I'm going with the 5 lead in 1 month, given the rate at which designs become obsolete in the BTC ecosystem.

"With a 10x10mm you could probably go 12-15W without a lot of problems, thinking from a chip-level power density scale (though it would depend on actual die size and Tjc) - if we're comfortable with 10W from an 8x8, 10x10 has 1.56 times the surface area for heat transfer."

Couple of reasons I like 10W:
1) Like to try to be conservative for longevity's sake.
2) Overclockers (like me) will push a design way past factory recommendations.

There probably is a better way to do it, just me being ignorant.

Isense resistance in bucks is, from my experience, in the mOhms. On/in chip, I think that can be dropped 1 or 2 (maybe 3) orders of magnitude resistance and if necessary use a more sensitive higher precision A/D say a 12 - 14 - 16 bit A/D versus an 8 or 10 bit.


Yes, and with an internal RTD one could throw Tj into the calculation mix as well.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has observed the hash rate drop as a unit heats up.
If one can control the Vcore and clock one might be able to mitigate this effect and re-fine tune it for changing ambient conditions.
Additionally, it would, like some CPU's do, allow a sliding scale of operation.
Protecting the chip from damage while allowing reduced capacity operation.
As opposed to say the Bitmain S(odd) which when it hits the magical 80C stops entirely.

Perfect for whom?
Bitcoin miners?


F'ing brilliant, have worked with 3 phase motor controllers that were 15 pin packages (if memory serves). Just trying to envision what the chip/heatsink/board combo would look like.


In the Synopsys world of IP things these SHA-256 cells are a proven item down to 14nm. I assume that they have taken that into account (... noise margins for each gate/transistor).


First off I've worked more with SPI, so I'm biased in that direction. My gut feeling is that SDLC/HDLC/LAPB et.al seems like overkill from a protocol perspective. Probably am FUBAR. Obviously I need to take a second look.

Exactly my thought. Was thinking an external clock feeding an adjustable internal PLL clock divider. In/on multiple chip boards one common external clock feeding multiple chips. That clock input could be configured on a chip by chip basis based on a writable register setting. Thereby allowing each chip on the board to be clocked differently.

Makes perfect sense.

This is a snippet of info I was totally unaware of. Thanks. Typically, do these clock generators "slide" the freq up and down or are they selecting a predetermined freq from a pool of freqs and then hopping amongst them?


That sounds dreamily expensive, if for no other reason than it has the word "Intel" in it. lol

My thought was to build in the ability to sense individual chip current draw and knowing Vcore yields chip W consumption, which is a component of W/GH/s. This combined with a knowledge of clock freq would provide the data to fine tune individual chips for most economic operating point.

I envision this value would be stored in a register on chip and externally read only. The voltage off the shunt feed to a simple A/D (8 or 10 bit) sampled every 100ms might suffice.

So the perfect hash chip would be:

1) 10x10mm QFP-EP or QFN-EP
2) Contact pitch = 1.00mm
3) Max Power consumption ~10W
4) Single belly pad for Grnd
5) Vcore supplied on pins on one side exclusively
6) 3 wire SPI interface ground plane referenced
7) Implemented in 14nm
Internal RTD
9) Internal Vcore current shunt
10) Mean targeted Hash Rate 100 GH/s
11) Targeted efficiency less than .1 W/GH/s
12) Cost per chip ~$3

What's the preference for setting clock analog or digital?
I'm assuming digital, but . . . .

What am I missing?

Can you even buy a 4004?
Now I have something to look up.

Looked it up.
Evidently these old CPU's have become collector's items Selling for as much as $1,000 each.
Had I only known.

Maybe not the right place to ask this question so am apologizing to Gekko et. al. in advance for posting here.

What would the community think about a wired ethernet stickminer?

i.e. exactly the same thing as a USB stickminer but interfaces via RJ45/48 male plug w/ a 6 pin PCIe power plug on the opposite end.
Could have a minimal web interface to access parameters (CoreV & Clock), miner status, pools, temps, and w/ port 4028 api access.
Thinking it would be a low-count hash-chip stick (2-4) made long and skinny.
DHCP or static IPv4.
Run an abbreviated Linux distro.

Used 12,16,24,48 port managed/unmanaged hubs/switches are cheap ($50-$200).
So on the low end a guy could plug 1 into a port on his/her router, on the high end 48 plugged into a 48 port switch and anything in between.

"I was thinking about ethernet working around collisions in the mid 70's but that's because I don't know WWII radio relay history. Nice tidbit of knowledge I'll have to look up now."
I know this cuz' I'm an old fart who did networking with smoke signals. 

Pretty sure it was Bell Labs and not HP or DEC cuz' they each had their own protocols (ARCNET and DECNET).
IBM of course had "choking ring" (token ring).

I prefer SPI versus UART. Just cuz' that's what I worked with the most.

As far as I know there are no USB 3.0 to SPI/I2C chips.
Most USB 3.0 stuff is targeted for the storage world. Hence the need for speed and are implemented to interface with other fast interface standards (SATA, PCIe, etc.). SPI/I2C/UART aren't, to the best of my knowledge, multi-gigabit protocols. Hence interfacing something that runs @ Mbps to something that runs @ GBps poses some challenges.

As far as I know USB 3.0 implementations are backwards compatible with 2.0 from a data/signaling standpoint.

But the point is why spend the expense for 3.0 when 2.0 has all the bandwidth required (for hashing) and it's butt loads cheaper. (redundant?)
Although, moving to 3.0 adds a contributing reason to put an MCU on a hash board, cuz' there are many MCU choices that have SPI/I2C/USB 3.0 as interfaces (some have ethernet too).

If I were doing a board, I'd use SPI onboard and USB (whatever) for off board comms. If that meant an MCU (due to a decision to implement USB 3.0 compatibility) then the more the merrier.
But it'd be a "smart" hash board (cuz' ya can w/ an MCU) and likely wouldn't be something inexpensive for the "home" miner.

In my mind, affordable = USB 2.0 and versatile/sophisticated/more expensive = USB 3.0

"Speed costs money, how fast can you afford to go."  -- Stroker McGurk

I have 2 machines with USB 3.0 add-in boards and rarely (if ever) use the ports.

BTW, The Synopsys IP SHA-256 cells come in 32 bit and 64 bit flavors.

Gotta' eat, be back l8r.

Thanks guys, this is the stuff I need to hear.

Our other projects (non crypto currency) are low power devices (or will be). They'll need to rad hardened cuz' of what we're gonna engineer inside the carrier. nuff' said.

Was digging around on the Synopsys website, seems they have pre-engineered SHA-256 cells in their IP library (amongst other cool stuff).
Am leaning towards QFP-EP design. I like contacts I can see. But I like the option of through PCB heat dissipation and a solid GP.
Seems QFP-EP starts @ 10 mm3 and goes up from there. So 8x8 is doable.

Like the idea of parallel I/O and stick a brain dead MC on the board for internal/external comms. Also want a the small MC for some refinements (core clock, per chip temp monitoring, per chip power consumption monitoring, hash rate monitoring, work unit buffering, NVRam, etc. . .)

"... but simple collision-resolution protocols for shared IO lines have been around since forever" Radio Talkers in WWII (CSMA/CD) is where ethernet came from. What's old is new again.

Gotta' get to bed so I can pay attention to tomorrow.
L8r folks.

Using ionizing radiation (x-ray) brings it's own set of issues to semiconductors. Just talk to the guys that designed semiconductor control circuits for the first nuc weapons. And the expense/hassle of getting licensed to operate an industrial strength x-ray emitter.


"Unless the footprint and pinout and protocol for successive generations of chips is the same ..." And is a contributing rationalization for getting into designing/implementing chips.
"... design a couple-hundred-amp multiphase regulator ..." = serious PITA.
"... and worry about" board level "high-power-density cooling concerns ..." in addition to chip heat dissipation issues.
"... simple and efficient and the inherent reliability simplicity and efficiency help bring to the table." KISS is always preferred.


"... greatly increase the required power without substantially increasing the die size available for cooling ..." Which is probably why they were playing around with immersion cooling. i.e. larger BTU per mm2 than air can dissipate.

Well, one doesn't know till one asks, thanks.

We have other concepts/projects we're working on that are not in the BTC realm but will ultimately be chip based. Consequently, we're slowly gearing up to design our own propriety chips.
What package types do you prefer to work with (i.e. are easiest to work with)?

Military trained me in 2M on a Pace 2500 in the early 80's. So have a handle on IR reflow and the trays. Have any specific manufacturers and models in mind?
I have 0 experience in BGA. WTF is "Balling gear"? Thought BGA chips had the little balls built into them. Think I've seen (Digikey?) BGA sockets like Intel uses for CPU's.

Just thinking outloud here:
1) If BGA sockets are available,
2) and a board with multiple sockets (say 4+) could be designed,
3) then, in theory, one could purchase a board and a hash chip (Spondoolie) and be up and running,
4) one could then buy additional hash chips and "grow" in hash power as desired.

I get that the sockets would add additional expense to the initial board cost, but would add the flexibility to cover multiple purchasers needs.
Maybe if one bought the sockets in bulk one could drive the cost down a tad.

"... some new equipment for the dev,"
Like what equipment?

Ohm's Law sucks sometimes. 100W / .5V = 200A. Hhhhmmmmm, so circuit traces made out of #2 welding cable? LOL, wonderful mental image.

"... - something about cranking it to maximum power, taking off the fan and then stuffing it under a couch cushion."
I would pay good money to be a fly on the wall . . . but only if the user sat on the cushion. LOL

"... and it would be very difficult for me to care less than I already do about scrypt."
ROTFL, I'll think about this off an on all day tomorrow and snicker uncontrollably.

Every international shipment we've done that's >$2499 has been a customs nightmare.
For what little it's worth, my heart goes out to you.