The chips will be as soon as immediately after the first batch of chips are tested by the foundry. But deploying of the newly produced chips still takes some time (PCB production, mining operation creation, employees and rents from expansion, etc).

On the chips' side, in our recent investigation to the foundry, it told us that although the minimum requirement for the first batch is 12 wafers, we have the privilege to stop paying the rest 9 ones if the first 3 ones fail to test. Therefore, the "first batch" is re-defined from 12 wafers to 3 wafers, and this is a good thing, because we could register the actual first batch as much more than number of 12 and don't have to pay for them before the mask set is proved to be correct.

I'm not familiar with p2pool. We want to always make our hashrates public, or our financials won't be transparent enough. I wonder if it is easy to identify how much hashrates are contributed by us from the p2pool statistics alone.

Thanks for answering when I was away. Yes, we are part of the Bitcoin world and rely on the security of Bitcoin to succeed. And if we ever reach 51%, we could use p2pool, or scatter our hashrates to different mining pools with explicit names like ASICMINER, and hence make the statistics public to all people who are concerned.

Yes. The same as current FPGA mining boards.

There is now. But it's not named as CAD drawing, but IC layout.

The first picture is the IC layout of the whole chip after P&R. The big cyan bar in the bottom center is the pins of the chip. Purple bars above and below the chip, as well as the light blue bars in the left and the right of the chip, are all power pads. The small rectangle in the bottom left is the blackbox of PLL IP module. The rest parts are real hashing units doing the actual job of erupting blocks.



The second picture is a magnified local part of the hashing unit. It's harder to tell which part is which in this picture, but it feels very nice for ourselves to see how our logic design turns out physical.

Update

Here we show something visual.

The first picture is the IC layout of the whole chip after P&R. The big cyan bar in the bottom center is the pins of the chip. Purple bars above and below the chip, as well as the light blue bars in the left and the right of the chip, are all power pads. The small rectangle in the bottom left is the blackbox of PLL IP module. The rest parts are real hashing units doing the actual job of erupting blocks.



The second picture is a magnified local part of the hashing unit. It's harder to tell which part is which in this picture, but it feels very nice for us to see how our logic design turns out physical.

Thanks for your question. Bitfountain has already invested 10k$ for the labor cost and EDA tools fee of physical design.
We ourselves made the logic-level design, tuning, and optimization so this part is almost free. We also keep another 15k$ or
so as a reserve for unexpected scenarios, but un-spent yet.

Of course the amount invested buy ourselves is much smaller compared to what we want to raise. Therefore it
resembles to the model that we become the 50% shareholder by contribution of mostly actual execution and technology factor.

Pricing of investment in venture business is always hard. Some would say 50% is unfair to the investors, because they
take almost all the risk. While others would say 50% is too high, since many angels provide all money for a startup to
bootstrapping out of it's infancy while only take 10-20%. But the greatest thing about market is that people vote with
their own stake, therefore the market cap of ASICMINER will tell us whether it's under- or over-priced in the next months
to come.

Thanks.

BTW, to guarantee security, it is suggested to enable GLBSE's two-factor authentication provided by Google immediately after you sign up.

Got about 50,000 shares of private-bulk pre-ordering already. Not fully executed yet though.

2 slots @ 2.5 BTC

As I said, <1$ per 100MH/s is the estimation of cost. The market price for selling will probably be higher.

Currently what we have are netlist files and back-end results in various stages. They haven't been visualized yet. But it's possible that we come up with tangible pictures to share before the production.

We definitely will.

We will also show other interesting pictures before the hardware is ready.

About the Extra Shares

The extra shares will be sent to investors when we decide that the IPO is about to succeed. Because if not and when we have to return back the 100.5% capital, we don't want to cause any wealth re-distribution from small investors to larger ones, since in the GLBSE system all shares are identical.

This means that if someone buys, say, 800 BTC worth of shares, 8,000 shares will be immediately sent to the investor. 800 extra shares will be sent later when it is certain that our IPO succeeds and no whole-capital-refunding needs to be triggered.

We believe this decision is fair for both small and large investors, and it does not violate the main thread and the contract. Thanks.

The typical production time of the mask-set by the foundry is 45-60 days. So in the best case, it is indeed possible that we finish the back-end in August, get chips produced in October, and make the first one working within the same month. The worse case is very hard to say, because there might even be failure cases. But November is already a little conservative, and we will definitely make the chips start hashing within this year, if we succeed.

It would be particularly nice if this were to boost up MU also. Since you are an insider, MU has an opportunity to jump in earlier if things turn out fine.
[/quote]

Yes. The expected date of making MU jump in is when we have found that the IPO itself is about to be successful.

Thanks for your question. I will try to answer them.

If BTC prices still rises as crazy after we stopped selling, we will do a proportional return as a big dividend before we begin to exchange BTC for fiat. But each ASICMINER share always owns 1/400000 of the company.

The unsold shares may be sold later, but hopefully with a higher price if we successfully produced our first batch of chips. We only guarantee that no more than 200,000 shares will be created and sold ever.

The price spread caused by the discounts are indeed large. From the investors perspective, who are not willing to buy so many shares for the discounts, could either directly buy from us, or from other people who offer less price. From our perspective, while it indeed discourages investors to directly buy small amounts from us, it attracts larger bulk purchase. After all, finally the market will settle the price down.

The important thing is that we will only give the extra shares when we decide that the IPO does not fail. Because when it fails and we return back the 100.5% capital, we don't want to cause any wealth re-distribution from small investors to larger ones, since in the GLBSE system all shares are identical.

Thanks. Though I won't call many suspected ones ponzis myself, but we feel that given all
the risks involved, the venture on ASICMINER still does not belong to the riskiest class of
GLBSE assets.

The products for sale will not be very early. However, if approved by all my partners and
motion-passed by our shareholders, we will be giving out a small batch of our first-generation
products to the community for free.

Thank you. Maybe it's just me kidding, but I still can't help my self saying it's not totally impossible
that the whole return could buy you a bar after several years.

Thanks for you interest. The 30,000 shares for public sale is already put as an ask wall on the GLBSE system with the asset name ASICMINER.

In fact the ASICMINER ticker was created more than a week ago. We were double-checking and discussing about the IPO details so the IPO was delayed to today.

Q: Why could I trust you?
A: In principle, like scientific theories, trustworthiness can only be
disproved. However some facts might contribute to more confidence: My ID, phone and email have all
been verified in GLBSE. I started running the fund called MU on GLBSE before it updated to version
2. I am also responsible for the GLBSE-listed bond MOORE.

Q: What about your partners?
A: They are my friends also located in China. I know them in person, trust
them myself in person. They are enthusiastic to this project and already commited a lot of hard
work at their best to make it succeed.

Q: Are you qualified of running Bitfountain and ASICMINER?
A: The short answer is yes.
    The long answer is: Although I myself come from a software background, my other two partners
have been worked in the IC field for long. One of my partners worked in a national lab focusing on
microprocessor design, the other worked in an CPU-for-embedded-device startup. Mining ASICs are
easy to be made work compared to their former projects, and the only problem is how good we could
make it to be. In this aspect, we have done almost all baseline optimizations and some more
aggressive ones. The uncommonly high heat density of mining ASICs is another technical problem but
we are also confident in solving it nicely.

Q: Why don't you raise money from angels or venture capitals?
A: Because most of them come from a different background to Bitcoin. The risk
model of their minds is far away from that of the Bitcoin community. They would consider Bitcoin
itself as an extra major, if not the biggest, source of risk. Therefore they usually tend to pose
harsher clauses than the Bitcoin community on us.

Q: Why don't you borrow money to do it?
A: Same as most startups: the expense is beyond the number we could borrow
from a normal channel. Plus, we are frank that our project involves quite a few risks. We choose to
share both the risks and the profits to investors willing to take them.

Q: Why do you choose to do IPO so early when you haven't reached the stage
of sending your final designs to the foundry?
A: Because we have to save time. If the IPO takes too long, or doesn't work
out so that we have find inferior ways to raise funds, time elapses and we will be outpaced by our
competitors. A IPO in parallel with the later stage of physical design will make the arriving date
of our products earlier. Plus, if we finally have found that it is necessary to cancel the IPO,
100.5% of all raised funds will be turned back to investors.

Q: What if your first generation of chips are outdated? What if the other
companies deliver their products earlier than you do?
A: The so called "outdated" technology is exactly why we have so inexpensive
NRE. And we plan to do self-mining before product-selling, to avoid pre-maturely triggering a
fierce price war. There will almost definitely a relatively long window for both us and our
competitors to profit before the market price of hashrates falls down to their margin cost. In
this time range, the difficulty will not exceed a level that even with our technology of choice,
the electricity fee and management cost is still negligible compared to the Bitcoins mined.

Q: The privileges of board members are vague. What exactly could they do?
A: Some of the information and details of our company is only provided on
request of board members. Board members can monitor our business running face to face, or send
representations to do it. We also hope that board members could help us with a full-fledged
open financial management on both the RMB-nominated and BTC-nominated funds.

Q: How will your MU and MOORE interact with ASICMINER?
A: I will try to keep as objective as possible and evaluate ASICMINER as yet
another normal startup when considering the configuration of the MU portfolio. MOORE, on the other
hand, will be boosted up to in MH/s per share with ASICMINER in exchange of its raised funds when
our chips come out, and also will be used as one of the mechanisms for ASICMINER to sell hashrates
in the future.

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Q: What is your fundraising target? How do you decide whether this IPO succeeds or not?
A: The minimum target is 100k$. If the raised funds surpass this number, we will consider that our IPO is successful. However, we would like to raise more (120-140k$) because keeping the budget at minimum is very prone to unexpected scenarios.

Q: So you will send the extra shares at at time?
A: Yes.

Q: How do you achieve so low costs?
A: There are several factors.
  1. 130nm node size. As the mainstream switches to 28nm, the 130nm existed for so long that even many smaller foundries could do it very well. The intense competition of manufacturing in China brings the price of everything down, including ICs.
  2. MLM(Multi-Level-Mask). Compared to full-mask, this technology reduces the cost of mask-set to half with the exchange of increasing the margin cost by about 40%. This is a good deal for us because the margin cost of chips themselves is one of the lowest cost in our budget.
  3. Low EDA license fees and low labor cost in China.
  4. We ourselves did most of the RTL design, optimization and simulation.

Q: Why don't you use Bitfountain for your GLBSE ticker?
A: Because the ASICMINER shareholders (GLBSE investors) have an extra set of privileges upon Bitfountain shareholder (us).

Introduction
ASICMINER is a virtual identity totally held by investors of the Bitfountain company. The Bitfountain company's business includes mining with self-built ASIC devices, as well as the sales of them. Currently ASICMINER shareholders holds 163,962 shares, while Bitfountain shareholders holds 236,038 shares. ASICMINER shares have the privilege of getting all net profits till 0.1BTC/share from the day when dividends began to be paid. They also have the exemption of dilution, which means that each ASICMINER share always equals to 1/400,000 of the total profits and voting power of the summed value from both ASICMINER and Bitfountain.

How to buy shares
There are no public exchanges approved or chosen by us yet. Nor we will be selling any of them without a public announcement. Currently you could only buy shares from earlier investors privately with or without third-party escrows. We provide no escrow service. The trade should be registered in our database to make the dividend payment conform with the transfer.

Dividend payment
The income, including mining income, sales via Bitcoins, and fiat income transferred to Bitcoins, are paid to ASICMINER and Bitfountain shareholders proportionally after the ASICMINER shares are paid by 0.1BTC each from the day when dividends began to be paid, when maintainance costs, labor costs, and R&D costs are taken.

Our chips
Generation 1: Block Eruptor. 130nm with 6-8J/GH. Each chip's rated frequency is 336MHz at 1.05V. It translates to 336MH/s because it does one hash per cycle. The chips work stable and well at 392MH/s at 1.15V. Further overclocking needs proper handling of heat and power supply.

Thanks. Yes, basically the more ASICs are produced, the lower the cost per chip becomes.


In fact, the margin cost per chip is less than $0.8 a piece, that is hopefully $0.8 per GH/s. Of course, if we consider the cost of heat sinks, fans, PCBs, power supplies, and the disperse of the initial NRE cost into each GH/s, it will be significantly higher, but still within a single digit dollars per GH/s.


If only considering the whole production cost, it is easy to achieve more than 100MH/s : 1$. The actual market price is another story of course.