Good job, please do share with the community what you've done to make it work. I'm sure it'll be an interesting read at least.

Hi all,

We've decided to temporarily halt pre-orders at this time. The response has been huge, with close to 70 total pre-orders! This exceeded our expectations, and we now need to focus on filling all of these orders and keeping you guys (and ladies) happy.

Stay tuned for us to get the first working prototype running. Once we get the technical details and logistics settled, we'll get back to you with a firm price point.

For those who haven't pre-ordered yet, watch this space. As soon as the pre-orders are handled, we'll let orders come in again.

Possimably, we've yet to set the final price yet, once we work all of that out I'll see what kinda discount you get.

Some of the PC PSUs I know, don't have the 3.3V stuffed. The upcoming board will work with anything from 5-19V, so it's up to the user if they wanna make some kinda adapter cable or what not to put on their own PSU solution.


New boards most probably won't be using the LMZ modules, I'll update as I go along the design decisions.


It isn't too bad actually.

No I'm not using a toaster oven, at my current workplace I routinely fix Xbox360s and PS3 consoles with a IR soldering station. That's what I use.

Unfortunately we're sold out on the initial batch of boards. We're working on a better board the next round and will have firm pricing later.
Power use and performance expected can be found at the 1st post.

I do the BGA + QFN soldering with a soldering station at work.

The initial 4 boards are sold out, I do have the 1st board that I assembled. I can sell that @ the same price if you're interested, let me know.

Jav: It could be, but it's seriously overkill for this. I'm sure it'l be seriously messy though.

It doesn't quite scale like that, since you're now using a larger PCB (slightly increased cost per board), but yes we are looking into that to make sre that's feasible, the original plan was to keep everything simple and easy to debug, thus only 1 FPGA per board, once you start going upwards there's gonna be alot more involved like software/communication issues that need to be worked out, no one I know has a dual FPGA board to test this out. Not to worry though, development is still on-going in the background and we'll bring them out when they're ready.

It does scale linearly with each FPGA addition, until of course you run out of network bandwidth or CPU power to feed the FPGAs quick enough.

To answer the previous question on whether the ITX motherboards are fast/good enough. On the current mining script (which isn't very well optimsed) my Q6600 quad core processor reports a utilisation of 3-4% max in windows when it's running. No idea how much that scales to when it's running on an atom, but it should be more then good enough. I need to test this out though, do have an atom board lying around.

How big is "bulk"? 10? 100? It makes a huge difference.

There's no real way to compare logic elements vs system gates, the only way would be to port the code over and see it'll fit.
From the rough looks of it, not gonna happen, there's the extra microcontroller and extra features sucking up silicon real estate.

I have no reason to believe it won't last as long as any Graphics card, if not better. The current cooling solution keeps the chip under 50deg, GPUs constantly run higher then that. The board itself is populated with quality components, most capacitors are ceramic and the remaining are polymer capacitors (that don't leak electrolyte).

The question remains of course, what if the fan fails? I'm sourcing for good ball bearing reliable fans. That probably is the thing that'd kill the FPGA, the rest of the board should still work though, those LMZ modules are very hardy and can take a direct short to the output. If you send the board back I can fix it at the cost of a new FPGA.

We aren't using the LX45, that's a puny part with 43+k logic cells. We've on the board a LX150 part that has 147+k logic cells, also the -2 plays a part in how fast the chip can run. -3 is what we have.

http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=122-1725-ND

That's where the wiki is wrong and needs to be edited. I couldn't find -3N parts in the 484 package in stock with any of the distributors (Digikey and Avnet), else I would've gone with them. Even if you go with a super cheap power supply, at small quantities, it's quite impossible to make a good PCB and keep component costs below $200 (a cheap PSU maybe $30 per FPGA? x5 that's $150 right there and then you'd need to include the PCB). Not to factor in the cost of soldering the BGAs. Maybe at 1.3k it might be doable.

5 FPGAs alone (without board any parts yet), will suck up the 1k budget already. We aren't trying to sell the boards with a sky high margin, the costs of the parts alone are just quite high at the moment.

It's just helps to justify it more, there's no easy way to cool these things well with such a small footprint, I haven't seen a heatsink that's alot higher then it's length/width (at least not where I live), I can't cool these passively, so adding a small fan ontop was the easiest way without having to scrounge for specialty heatsinks (the current heatsinks I use are about USD$1 each, affordable, the fan adds a few more bucks.)

Without a fan you'd be running into finger scorching temps. I have no idea what the actual on die temps are like (the chip is encased in a plastic epoxy package), but I'd definitely not be running 24/7 at those temps.

I know at this point the board may seem to be pricey, but the costs for the board and components for low volume orders are high, let me put it into context. The spartan-6 based dev board that FPGAminer uses during dev costs USD$1000, this is less then 1/2 that cost, yes it doesn't have all the other features, but that's what we want for a mining board.

We'd like to at this point sell off a couple of the boards I have on hand and recoup some of the original investment to continue spinning the next batch of boards.

Support for the original board (this batch) will continue for as long as feasible, upgrades may come in little modules that you can plug into the Jtag port (for chaining etc.), we aren't planning to screw the early adopters over.

I'll try daisy chaining them on the next board I produce. I'm sure within the Xilinx ISE it'll work fine, but outside of that (the mining script etc.) I don't think it's set up just yet to use 2 FPGAs, pretty sure some code changes in the mining script at least should take care of that.

Sub $500 will just not be possible with current FPGA prices/performance for 1Ghash/s

Jordoss: It runs on a Spartan-6 FPGA, basically most of the calculation process is implemented in hardware, thus making it fast and power efficient.

I'm in Singapore and will be assembling the 1st few boards. Singpost (our national postal service) will do it, the entire board itself weighs about 200 grammes inclusive of packaging (bare board is about 60g). If you want to cut down on shipping even further, I can ship without the heatsink+fan combination and you can add them later (assuming you can find something suitable locally).

They do offer the option of registering the item, so it can be tracked, I've shipped with them a fair amount of times, with some fairly high value items, and it hasn't been a problem thus far.