Update

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

As planned, the second time of rising the hashrate in each share will start at some time after the ASICMINER project succeeds its first deploying of hashpower.

In the long run, MOORE will be used either a mechanism of selling hashrates of ASICMINER, or stay as my personal contract to shareholders. Both are possible, but the decision is not at a highest priority in our short-term plan.

Update

The samples passed all functionality tests. The power consumption is also within the expected range. And as our overclocking tests had shown, they still have a lot of potentials compared to our original spec. This means that the biggest risk of our project is gone and our NRE is a fruitful spend.

The first production batch of chips will be out of the packaging service tomorrow. Our deploying is on its way.

Briefly yes. But the new platform is not owned by us. We have more control to it than other third-party platforms. It's also more secure and easier to audit/monitor than others. We couldn't give an exact timeline but also as said before it will be before our first dividend payment, which is in the very near future since the first mining farm using self-designed ICs in the world is about to be born.

Update

Here is the good news:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.msg1422891#msg1422891

And sorry for the delay of confirming the rest shareholder information caused by the
job of testing, troubleshooting and deploying, but we will do it very soon.

Update

After a long and anxious waiting, we have finally got our packaged chip samples at hand. Everyone would be busy in the following 2-3 weeks.

The following pics are taken from my cellphone.

30GHash/s of computing power on one table:


Top and bottom side of the chips:


A closer look at our baby:

Update

This is again a quick update.

We received (again) the revised version of shareholders' information from GLBSE.
The difference is that this time the whole number finally adds up. So if its data is
indeed correct, it should contain all shareholders' information, including those who
refused to share their information with the asset issuers. Therefore we will base the
shareholder data on the new version.

1) GLBSE still owes us money, but the total debt is much less than 5000BTC. As I promised before, the rest debt is restructured as: GLBSE owes me, and I owe the company. If we fail to get the rest debts back I would be responsible for paying back to the company.
2) As far as we know it's not information delay. It's because the foundry sped up in the later stage (called "bullet" in their jargon) and the last 12 layers are way different.
3) It's for fail-tolerance. The second half of the chips stayed at the stage that has 14 layers left, to allow further modifications if the first batch of chips fail to work due to design or manufacturing flaws that are fixable without re-doing the whole mask.

Update

This is a quick update. Please expect more details soon.

1. Our wafers are already in the slicing and packaging service. Whether we could beat everyone else in early delivering, or we have to revise and redo the wafers, will be known within the next two weeks.

2. All shareholders who have ambiguous Bitcoin addresses will receive the confirmation mails within this week.

3. We will make ASICMINER re-hosted after the confirmations, as well as the platform decided. It will not be later
than our first deploying and the first payment to shareholders.

Update

This is a quick update indicating that:

1. Confirmation mails have been sent to all shareholders who have different Bitcoin addresses claimed to GLBSE and to us.
2. All newly generated coupons are still accumulated into the first big payment when 2 is done.

More updates will be given soon.

Update

There are several news:

1. The process of our rest layers are significantly faster, we are now in QC and expecting to have the wafer arrived at our packaging service next week. Then the slicing, packaging, and testing will start immediately.

2. The shares are under processing. Shareholders (determined per e-mail address) offering different addresses to GLBSE and to us will receive a confirmation mail asking which to use or whether changing to a newer one. And we also hope to identify the shareholders who claim both different e-mail addresses and different addresses as many as possible. The principle would basically be:
  1) If the shareholder has both claimed to GLBSE and to us, we will use the share number provided from GLBSE.
  2) If during analysis, the shareholder hasn't claimed to GLBSE but claimed to us, we will keep a separate list and see if it should be merged.
  3) If the shareholder hasn't claimed to us but claimed to GLBSE, we will of course use the GLBSE data.

1) There will be QC guaranteeing offering basic qualification, but the testing(functional, electronic, thermo) will be first done by us. After that, part of the testing (functional) will be done by the same company that does packaging for us.

2) After the shipping.

3) They would consider a 2/3 yield rate a non-failed one. However in most circumstances the rates are much higher than this bottom line. Made-in-China of course are connected with the impression of lower quality, but calculating with a whole project should put the overall cost into consideration. TSMC has higher threshold for newcomer clients and is less affordable.

Yes. And we are working towards it. First we need to sort the actual data out from what we have now. We have a close partner working on a new platform that is considerably safer than GLBSE due to its more secure structure. And of course existing platforms like btc.co are also sound options. It is also optional for each shareholder to join the platform or to lock the shares in with us.

We will set it up on another platform, but not necessarily btct.co.

And before that, I will first make the accumulated payment as soon as I finish comparing and confirming the
GLBSE data with the user claims, of which both are incomplete.

We confirm it. They are sent as two different .yml files. We will merge them and compare them with our older claims, then make them online in another platform.

They are either directly distributed to shareholders, or sold as physical devices/bonds. In the latter case, we would
pay all of the net profits to shareholders, or some of them if the shareholders agree to keep a portion as growing funds.

This description is also very accurate for our case, except that we located the PCB assembly in the same city as the packaging service's. It would keep us away from some shipping time via inter-city third-party expresses.

Our fab describes 1.4-1.5 day per layer as "hot-run" and 1.1-1.2 as "super hot-run" or "bullet". We guess the difference comes mainly from the usage rate of the production lines older than 90nm. Since there are still many orders from mainland China that are 90-130nm, the lines are busy, as said by the foundry. TSMC on the other side, deals with more orders more state-of-the-art, would be capable of process 90-130nm orders faster since the corresponding lines are less busy. Of course this is also only a conjecture.

They indeed give an projected date accurate to a certain day, but this does not mean that the date is not "fuzzy". For example, the date estimation was adjusted to a earlier one after our progress had sped up.

The PCB's out and tested using artificial signals (using a software-controlled source of signal to simulate the chips). The place for our first batch's deploying is also located. The first chip starting mining will be very early if the chips are correct (no more than a week after we get the chips), but the whole 12TH/s of our first batch would be online incrementally. So the process if our chips are successfully tested would be:
testing boards running &
samples sent to community &
(more than) 50TH/s more orders to the fab &
Next-gen design started
(~2-3 weeks)
First 6TH/s online
(~2-3 weeks)
Second 6TH/s online
(~0-4 weeks)
50TH/s of chips out
(~2-3 weeks, ~2-5 weeks if location changes)
Part or all of the 50TH/s online
(~uncertain yet time)
Part or none of the 50TH/s productionized and for sale &
Third batch of mass production done &
Next-gen chips' order sent to the fab

Update

We will run about 6TH/s after we received them, and another 6TH/s about 2-4 weeks later. The accurate hashrate depends on the yield rate and how well we push our chips to their limits.

We would wait the testing of the previous batch to order the second. The second batch would be 50TH/s or more, depending on the status of their production line in the first season of 2013.

As decided at the IPO time, one 5,000 shares to be a board member.

For the first generation of products, all steps have been taking place and will happen in China. This including chips production, PCB production, slicing & packaging, assembly, and deploying, in different places though. For example, while the production is in where the foundries are, we have more freedom to choose a place with very inexpensive power source to do self-mining.

There are 12 layers left, which means that the last financial week we progressed for 4 layers.

Update

We will set MOORE up again with MU and ASICMINER. We will decide which one to switch when the shareholder data
is more or less fixed. With our own collection of shareholder information, we have only collected 1,295 shares out of the
total 3,958 shares in circulation. So we would like to wait for the information from GLBSE and come up with a more complete
set.

Here is the recent update from GLBSE:
Nefario is not in contact as usual, but one of his friends is. We got the information of "I think he has released most of the major stock classes funds" today, but haven't received anything in our mailbox. We have checked again with our account name provided and are waiting for responses.

The upgrade plan still holds. The shares will be upgraded no matter our ASICMINER succeeds soon or not. But the upgraded hash/share will depend on whether we use our own hardware or other vendors.

24th and 25th Week's Coupon Pre-Calculation

Calculation time: November 28, 06:57:22 forum time

Number of difficulty change: 1
Number of block reward change: 0

Time interval:

  Starting from: November 15, 04:57:47
  Ending at: November 26, 11:08:37
  Total time: 972650s
  Difficulty: 3,368,767.14

  Starting from: November 26, 11:08:37
  Ending at: November 28, 06:57:22
  Total time: 157725s
  Difficulty: 3,438,908.96

Hashrate of this week: 1.43805

coupon/share = (1.43805*10^6)/(2^32)*(972650*50/3,368,767.14+157725*50/3,438,908.96)=0.0056014

Number of Shares: 3958

Total Payment: 75.3694234 (last accumulated) + 22.1703412 (recent two weeks) = 97.5397646

(The payment will be linearly accumulated till we are able to pay)

Update

Nefario is not in contact as usual, but one of his friends is. We got the information of "I think he has released most of the major stock classes funds" today, but haven't received anything in our mailbox. We have checked again with our account name provided and are waiting for responses.

They are at the stage of wafer-process, which is the last one before slicing and packaging, and is the most time-consuming. They have finished 13 layers out of the total 29, and there are 16 layers to go. The speed was originally very low (1-2 layers a week), and had become quicker in recent weeks.

Yes. An IC project needs many factors to be successful. As the technology improves, the interconnection between the design and the manufacturing becomes subtler, causing many projects not able to succeed in their first try. We picked the very conservative and mature 130nm as our choice, reducing unexpected factors to the least.

While the foundry haven't not give out the estimated time, our foundry agent did. The person in charge gave us the oral promise of December, but not as an extra formal deadline in the contract.

A mail to the board has also been sent to reply and discuss the revising of the business plan. Board members please post your advices if you have some time. Thanks.

We are very sorry for our misunderstanding. We are using an older version of TheSeven's Bitcoin miner written in Python as the code base to run our test boards. It had been also used for testing when we were in the FPGA verification phase. However, since the chips are not out yet, we are running with artificial unreal signals without the actual chips producing them. So "our part" of specialization/optimization couldn't be done without real chips providing real statistics.

We chose it because we wanted to focus on the hardware and spend less time on fixing the code. It may be totally abandoned and switched to a C-written miner if we couldn't push the number of mining boards each controller board could handle high enough with the overhead of the Python interpreter.

We are very sorry but it is now hard to achieve the projected date given by the time we were doing the design, because of the delay from our chip manufacturer.

With respect to the firmware, that is, software running on each mining board's controller MCU, there are no reason why we couldn't make them public except that they are not final. What we would like to keep secret is the RTL design, which contains a lot of optimizations. Everything else will be open since they are almost straightforward.

So the community will get the firmware immediately after we get a really running version with real chips. We are sorry again for the original estimated date and the current slower progress.

Would you mind if you could PM us for some more details please? We are doing everything we could to make sure we are not the cause of the critical path of the whole project and reduce the whole deploying time. So we will be very glad if we could get any help and idea from you.

Update

We are very sorry for the delay of chips delivery. The OP was initially created to raise funds. Now it should used for other purposes like general information. However, the current OP also serves as a detailed version of the contract. With GLBSE unable to recover the contract text, we ask for people to first quote it several times before we make a significant change to it.

Yes. The wafer process is done layer by layer and we could see the progress on track. We began receiving software generated excel updates from the foundry bypassed through our foundry agent showing the production status almost every workday.

Nice. We will keep people updated whenever we receive them.

It is in principle not able to 100% distinguish false claims with wrong claims caused by dynamic open orders and inaccurate memory. So we would rather not to make them open, especially that we don't have the right to publicize information with the owners want them be private.

The total sum is a little over 150k, with some claims are ranges instead of accurate numbers. It's rather close to the total shares in circulation before GLBSE was shut down. If there are no significant refusal or missing of claims, we truly admire the honesty of claimers as a whole.

This data will be used if GLBSE fails to deliver us their version before we start to mine and pay our dividends. Of course, it is still much better that we could get the GLBSE data and we will never have to use it.

23rd Week's Coupon Pre-Calculation

Calculation time: November 15, 04:57:47 forum time

Number of difficulty change: 1
Number of block reward change: 0

Time interval:

  Starting from: November 7, 10:40:22
  Ending at: November 12, 17:51:11
  Total time: 457849s
  Difficulty: 3,304,356.39

  Starting from: November 12, 17:51:11
  Ending at: November 15, 04:57:47
  Total time: 212796s
  Difficulty: 3,368,767.14

Hashrate of this week: 1.42536

coupon/share = (1.42536*10^6)/(2^32)*(457849*50/3,304,356.39+212796*50/3,368,767.14)=0.0033473

Number of Shares: 3958

Total Payment: 62.12081 (last accumulated) + 13.2486134 (this week) = 75.3694234

(The payment will be linearly accumulated till we are able to pay)

Update

GLBSE

Our newest knowledge tells us that the law-violating risk for him is not as critical as this. However, it is still true that we haven't got the
timeline for the shareholder information.

If the subject is us, we have more backups: we have printed version of the spreadsheet and we are also keeping it on our mailbox. If it's GLBSE, while we also believe the probability is low, our collection of claims deals with exactly this kind of scenario.

Yes it is. We will send confirmation e-mail to claimants we haven't sent confirmation mails to.

Yes. Besides, larger investors could still choose to lock your shares in and let us manually maintain them if you don't trust the new platform.

The Project
The in-foundry production is still going on and the status shown from the foundry updates is active. As explained here before:


As far as we know, there are no conspiracy against our project from any competitors or interest groups. What we are experiencing is a busier pipeline from the production house.