The PCB assembly house we have contracted with in California has all the following certifications. Their failure rate is among the industry's lowest. Your chips will be in very good hands.

Nadcap Accredited
Nadcap is the leading worldwide cooperative program of major companies designed to manage a cost-effective consensus approach to special processes & products (such as electronic manufacturing and others) and provide continual improvement within the aerospace industry.

AS 9100 Certified
The aerospace industry's quality system standard, this PCB assembly house became AS9100 registered in 2005. AS9100 fully incorporates the entirety of the current version of ISO 9000, while adding additional requirements relating to quality and safety. All major aerospace manufacturers and suppliers worldwide require compliance and/or registration to AS9100 as a condition of doing business with them.

ISO-9000 Certified
Industry Standard that defines fundamentals relating to quality systems. this PCB assembly house achieved ISO-9000 certification for manufacturing in June of 1997. Since quality is our utmost concern, members of our Audit Team attended 16 hours of training with QAI and were certified as Internal Quality Auditors. In addition, we are audited by NSF (an independent auditor) every six months to ensure ongoing compliance.

ISO 13485 Certified
This PCB assembly house became ISO 13485 registered in 2008. ISO 13485 is an ISO standard, published in 2003, that represents the requirements for a comprehensive management system for the design and manufacture of medical devices.

J-STD-001 Certified
Joint Industry Standard that provides a blue print or how-to-guide for electronic manufacturing. this PCB assembly house became J-STD-001 certified in December of 2002. Our Hand Soldering Team is led by an IPC-ANSI-J-STD-001 Certified Trainer in the Requirements for Soldered Electrical and Electronic Assemblies.

J-STD-001ES Certified
J-STD-001ES (an addendum to J-STD-001E) provides requirements to ensure the reliability of soldered electronic assemblies that must survive the vibration and thermal cycle environments getting to and operating in space.

NASA Certified Solderers
Since 2008, this PCB assembly house has provided NASA 8739.3 certified solderers and NASA 8739.2 SMT certified operators for your Flight electronics; we also have NASA 8739.1 certification for conformal coating and NASA 8739.4 certification for cable harnesses. This PCB assembly house has participated in projects with JPL, NASA and DARPA as well as the Canadian Space Agency.

ITAR registered
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is a set of United States government regulations that control the export and import of defense-related articles and services on the United States Munitions List (USML).[1] These regulations implement the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), and are described in Title 22 (Foreign Relations), Chapter I (Department of State), Subchapter M of the Code of Federal Regulations. The Department of State interprets and enforces ITAR. Its goal is to safeguard U.S. national security and further U.S. foreign policy objectives.

Welcome to the Beach Side condo, Evan!

There will be UPS, but the facility does not have its own backup generator. If the blackout is more than thirty minutes, then we're all out of luck.

EDIt:
This is straight from the Douglas PUD website:

INTERRUPTION OF SERVICE:

Your District will use reasonable diligence to provide an adequate and uninterrupted supply of electrical energy at normal voltage and communication services at maximum speeds.  However, if the supply shall be interrupted without notice for any cause, such failure shall not constitute a breach of the District’s agreement for service.

Your District shall have the right to temporarily suspend electric and communication services for the purpose of making repairs or improvements to the system, but in such cases, when practicable, public notice shall be given and every effort will be made to make such interruptions as short as possible.

The District shall not be liable for any consequential damages resulting from the interruption, restorations, or reduction of electric and communication services from any cause, including but not limited to failure of generation and distribution system, inadequacy of energy supply, implementation of emergency plans or temporary disconnections for repairs and maintenance or failure to pay for service rendered.  During an emergency declared by appropriate civil authority, it is possible that the District may be required to curtail or disconnect electric and communication services.

Thanks for correcting my arithmetic. Yes, Avalon has released new specs for the chip, and it does come out to 2.5W consumption (2.4W to be more precise).

As for your questions, thanks for asking. Here are the answers:

I have high confidence that the management fees will stay. This is slowly gaining interest, and if we reach a critical mass, the management fees can only benefit from economies of scale.

If the venture fails, then you will get your units back. However, you will have to pay for shipping and handling costs. If you own less than 8 units (a module with its own heat sink), it is understood that what you will get back are just the hashing units (condo units). If you own less than 4 modules, it is understood that what you will get back are just the modules. This is a worst-case scenario and I'm not aiming for it.

Yes, for similar fees, I am willing to host other hardware. However, I won't call it a "data center" operation at this point. A data center implies a host of other things that this setup will lack. All I can promise at this point is that the machines will be in a facility that is manned 24/7 (the person is watching other things, not just our mining rigs). There will be a local computer company servicing the machines. A service technician will be cleaning and maintaining the machines once every four months, and this local company will be on call so that if a condo unit breaks, a technician will come and shut down the one system involved, and replace the broken hashing unit. A number of web-cams will be installed, allowing the whole setup to be viewable from anywhere in the world.

SUP; flyonwall; flyonwall

It's only natural that I support my own project 

OWN; flyonwall

ASIC Chip Condo
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189976.0

Thank you SebastianJu.

Also, the Condos will not be located in Cebu City anymore. Electricity is too expensive there. The Condos will be located in Douglas County, Washington, USA. Electricity rates in this place are among the lowest cost in the world.

I will review what I wrote and make it clearer:

There are five Condo Systems on sale now at 1.34BTC per Condo Unit.
Each Condo System has 32 Units, so there's a total of 160 on sale.
Out of those 160 units, 64 have already been sold.
Therefore, there are still 96 left to buy at the discounted price.

Looks like the Spartan-6 bitstream is out: https://github.com/BitSyncom/avalon-ref/tree/master/FPGA

Thank you, Avalon.

I am waiting ... everyone's waiting. Any day now.

Please clarify what you mean by "the linux kernel simply sits on top of the ftdi_sio driver".

My point is this: USB involves complex protocol, UART is simple. We can simulate a direct UART connection between any two systems through the Internet, as is being done as we speak. Now the Internet protocols are even more complex than USB. The easiest way to talk UART to another system through the Internet is NOT to muck with the Internet protocols (that would be crazy). The easiest way is to have another Internet appliance (similar to the one used on the other UART endpoint), and talk UART to that appliance. Similarly in the case of USB.

The simple topology seems to be [sio driver] <--> [usb driver] <-- usb wire --> [usb protocol hw] <--> [uart hw], with the [uart hw] on Avalon's control unit side dictating that the [sio driver] be used on the cgminer side. That's my point.

In other words, we may have to remove the [uart hw] on the Avalon control unit to get rid of the [sio driver] on cgminer.

Most likely we will run out of time trying to craft an enhanced Control Unit. The USB connection to the Spartan-6 can be enhanced by replacing both the uPD720114 and the FT232 UART with a single CY7C68013A which serializes/deserializes to 16-bits. However, if there is no serious problem with the way it is now, and Avalon releases the Spartan-6 bitstream before we can complete ours, we will just use the original Avalon design.

This means we also don't have to do any Spartan-6 programming. We will just use the Avalon FPGA bitstream, as is.

It all depends on when Avalon will release the Spartan-6 bitstream ...

What is the issue with going through usb-serial code?  Is it a bottleneck?  Or is this to improve reliability?

I ask this question because I am currently trying to decide whether to design my own Control Unit and replace the way the USB on the Control Unit is grafted onto the Spartan-6. The USB connection to the Spartan-6 can be enhanced by replacing both the uPD720114 and the FT232 UART with a single CY7C68013A which serializes/deserializes to 16-bits.

EDIT:
It seems that the serial driver has to be used in cgminer because, on the Control Unit side, the USB goes through an offchip UART before connecting to the Spartan-6.

The problem(s) maybe caused by the fact that, on the Avalon Control Unit, the USB serial I/O connects to a UART (FT232), instead of being deserialized and sent to the Spartan-6 chip. So to talk to the Spartan-6, you really need to use the UART protocol instead of the USB protocol. It seems to me that the USB protocol is transparent (or pass-through) in this case.

Question: I have done some USB driver work on Windows. How difficult would it be to remove the serial port driver and go directly to USB? The USB protocol is more complicated than that for UART, but I imagine in cgminer high-level interfaces should look very similar to those for a UART?

Are there Avalon owners already doing this? So it can be done even without modifying the Control Unit?

At some point, when the difficulty rises to a level that even the Avalon chips will have a hard time earning for the Avalon miners, of what use is your expensive Avalon mining equipment?

I am looking into the possibility of using the chips to mine for PPCoins. This crypto-currency uses the same hashing algorithm as Bitcoin. In fact, it is derived from Bitcoin source code.

For those who bought Avalon systems, I believe this repurposing would require reprogramming the Spartan-6 Control Unit. Other than this, I don't see any other changes that would be required.

What do you think?

Yes, that's why we decided against locating in the Philippines. Also, your link is 2 years old. The rate in Cebu City is now about 30 cents per kWh.

Recurring Expenses (including management fee)

1. Electricity - approx 3 cents per kWh (Douglas county, WA)
2. Internet access - shared with other owners
3. Space fee - 0.012 BTC per unit (10 chips) per month
4. Management fee - 5% of your earning (no bigger than what you would pay a mining pool)

Among all the countries of the world, I don't think there's any country that can beat 3 cents per kWh. (Maybe there's a place in Australia that is cheaper, let me know.) If you find this price hard to believe, here is the link to the Douglas county PUD.

If we simply put the power consumption of each condo unit at 6.6W * 2.82 GH/s, then in one hour it consumes 18.612 Watt hours, which is 446.69 Watt hours in a day, which is 13.4 kWh in a month. Therefore, at 3 cents per kWh, your electricity cost per month comes to less than one U.S. dollar a month (40 cents)! If you own a whole box (32 units), your electricity cost per month is only about $12.86 per month. The Condo Management System will convert this into BTC and charge it prorated from every distribution, along with the Internet access and space fees. The management fee of 5% will then be calculated and charged also. The management fee is not a fixed amount, which is good for you because then it would be in Centerus' interest to optimize your earnings on a daily basis. If you don't earn, we don't earn also.

EDIT:
The average electricity cost in the U.S. is about 15 cents per kWh, so compared to Anytown, USA, your cost in Douglas county is only one-fifth of the average. In other words, in most other places, you are looking at electricity expenses of at least $64.30 per box per month. So even for those who are already running their own Avalon boxes, it may make sense to entrust your box to us. Initially our operation will not be anywhere like a data center operation, but we will improve.

Now remember, if we become big enough, we can be our own mining pool, and you don't have to pay another fee for a separate mining pool. I realize there are mining pools that don't charge any fees, and its up to you to join those. The Condo Management System will allow you to join any compatible mining pool. You are in control of your units.

The Avalon SHA256 chip communications specs are out: https://github.com/BitSyncom/avalon-ref/blob/master/SPEC/A3256Q48-130507-V03-EN.pdf

I don't see any discrepancy between my description of the communication protocol, and the official description from Avalon. Except for the fact that the Avalon is much more detailed (at the bit-level), I think my description of it is a very good summary.

So now, on to Spartan-6 programming! We are using a Spartan-6 card that we ordered from alibaba.com to do our prototyping.