New BFL update. 25 February 2013.

[repentance]

If the bumping facility really has the chips bumped and ready for testing by Friday (as they imply for the projected start of deliveries is March 9th) then there is really no need to burn, i.e. destroy 1 whole wafer. 1.000 chips less for the 1st month pre-orders....

I think there point is that there's no benefit in waiting until all of the wafers are bumped - they're going to have to destroy a wafer in order to test unpackaged chips so they might as well destroy the first bumped wafer now as wait until the end of the week.  The alternative is waiting until they have some packaged chips to test.

If the chips test OK then being able to accelerate the delivery of the other 69,000 chips might be worth the sacrifice - but early chip delivery isn't going to worth a damn unless they get the rest of their production processes streamlined in a hurry.  If they can't get 6,000 chips bumped, packaged, placed on boards, assembled into units and shipped, how the hell are they going to manage turning their 63,000 bulk order into working units and getting them to customers before hell freezes over?

[DutchBrat]

If the bumping facility really has the chips bumped and ready for testing by Friday (as they imply for the projected start of deliveries is March 9th) then there is really no need to burn, i.e. destroy 1 whole wafer. 1.000 chips less for the 1st month pre-orders....

I think there point is that there's no benefit in waiting until all of the wafers are bumped - they're going to have to destroy a wafer in order to test unpackaged chips so they might as well destroy the first bumped wafer now as wait until the end of the week.  The alternative is waiting until they have some packaged chips to test.

If the chips test OK then being able to accelerate the delivery of the other 69,000 chips might be worth the sacrifice - but early chip delivery isn't going to worth a damn unless they get the rest of their production processes streamlined in a hurry.  If they can't get 6,000 chips bumped, packaged, placed on boards, assembled into units and shipped, how the hell are they going to manage turning their 63,000 bulk order into working units and getting them to customers before hell freezes over?

They are accelerating by 1 week at the most according to their latest timeline.... seeing as the project is already 4 months delayed I really don't see the benefit in destroying 1000 chips

Especially not since those 1000 chips could go towards 1st month orders. They are now sacrificing 1st month orders to get later orders filled earlier. As everyone has already paid for their order...and the money is already in the bank for them, they are simply showing a lot of disregard for their early believers.... IMO

[punin]

From Josh's latest update:

..we can send it to the ASIC engineers who can essentially wire bond it manually and test the chips..

How on earth are the engineers going to wire bond a bumped wafer if it's not diced?! Maybe Josh should've kept that quarter for himself. You know, to purchase a clue

[repentance]

Especially not since those 1000 chips could go towards 1st month orders. They are now sacrificing 1st month orders to get later orders filled earlier. As everyone has already paid for their order...and the money is already in the bank for them, they are simply showing a lot of disregard for their early believers.... IMO

If their early believers were going to bail, they would likely have done so by now.  It's the later orders which are more at risk of cancelling - BFL needs to keep those people on the hook as well as encourage new people to place orders now.  If they can't keep people whose orders aren't in Batch 1 or Batch 2 on the hook, then the only people who are going to be ordering from them are people using their discount vouchers - who'll probably put up with delivery of their new orders being delayed several months in order to get their "compensation".

Mining's starting to look a lot less appealing to many people, and will probably look even less so by the time May rolls around.  It doesn't matter if every single person cancels their Batch 1 order - Batch 2 people will just get their units sooner.  It does matter if BFL can't attract a steady stream of new orders, though.

How on earth are the engineers going to wire bond a bumped wafer if it's not diced?!

I presume that's what's going to destroy the wafer - them dicing it themselves to get test chips.  They're probably wishing they'd done an MPW about now.

[greyhawk]

From Josh's latest update:

..we can send it to the ASIC engineers who can essentially wire bond it manually and test the chips..

How on earth are the engineers going to wire bond a bumped wafer if it's not diced?! Maybe Josh should've kept that quarter for himself. You know, to purchase a clue

By dremeling the hell out of it.

Expect "We had been promised delivery of the Dremel by today, but unfortunately the Fedex man came and gone without it. I am right now trying to find out what happened to it" real soon now.

Also: "What the hell do you expect me to do? Drive to Lowe's and buy one?"

[Phinnaeus Gage]

From Josh's latest update:

..we can send it to the ASIC engineers who can essentially wire bond it manually and test the chips..

How on earth are the engineers going to wire bond a bumped wafer if it's not diced?! Maybe Josh should've kept that quarter for himself. You know, to purchase a clue

By dremeling the hell out of it.

Expect "We had been promised delivery of the Dremel by today, but unfortunately the Fedex man came and gone without it. I am right now trying to find out what happened to it" real soon now.

Also: "What the hell do you expect me to do? Drive to Lowe's and buy one?"

I know it's not a Dremel, but isn't cutting chips from a wafer a delicate process, one requiring the least amount of heat created?

[greyhawk]

I know it's not a Dremel, but isn't cutting chips from a wafer a delicate process, one requiring the least amount of heat created?

Yes. But does Burning Fire Labs know?

[Frizz23]

By dremeling the hell out of it.

Mystery solved! I always thought this was a soldering iron - but it's a dremel 

[Enigma81]

By dremeling the hell out of it.

Mystery solved! I always thought this was a soldering iron - but it's a dremel 

Hot Air Rework Wand.

[ab8989]

I have not had a high opinion about the folks at BFL. Their updates have been quite repetitive with constant stream of delays and how completely ridiculous but grandiouse sounding measures they are taking to address them ( go wait in somebodys office, angry locusts etc.. ), but this last update is nothing short of an act of a genius.

I have rubbed my hairy ball that is rarely wrong and it predicted that what is going to happen next is that BFL labs are claiming *) that they had great success with the wire bonded chip and they have a working unit in lab, however they now have plausible explanation how they are not shipping anything for months. I see the walls of BFL building imploding from the power of millions of dollars in new preorder money flowing in.

Or the other possibility is that they experience some unexpected flub with the test chip ( how that could possibly happen ) in which case I am quite dissapointed in their repetitive array of completely unexpected delays which always take me with a complete suprise when they happen about every other week.

*) Note that the operative word here is CLAIMING.

[Uglux]

From BFL forum:

Seems to me everyone here developed stockholm syndrome

+1

[Frizz23]

From BFL forum:

Seems to me everyone here developed stockholm syndrome

Not exactly everyone. But everyone with-more-than-30-posts-and-not-yet-deleted developed stockholm syndrome.

Heretical minds get deleted pretty quickly over there.

[regular]

I thought I was reading about bASIC 2.0 with these new excuses.

[miter_myles]

I thought I was reading about bASIC 2.0 with these new excuses.

There hasn't been any "drunken" and/or "hacked" BFL posts/accounts yet..

[Puppet]

think there point is that there's no benefit in waiting until all of the wafers are bumped - they're going to have to destroy a wafer in order to test unpackaged chips so they might as well destroy the first bumped wafer now as wait until the end of the week.  The alternative is waiting until they have some packaged chips to test.

What exactly will they test ? You can do non destructive functional testing using a wafer prober, particularly if BFL had a clue and implemented some built-in self tests. And you cant test a bazillion things on a chip thats not packaged, like the integrity of the package, IO, analog signal stuff,  impact of thermal and physical stress,... So I really dont see what the big advantage is of destroying 5000+ chips to be able to test, what exactly ?

[PuertoLibre]

I thought I was reading about bASIC 2.0 with these new excuses.

There hasn't been any "drunken" and/or "hacked" BFL posts/accounts yet..

Compare Toms drunken and raging heart to that of BFL Josh.

Is there a difference?

[Bicknellski]

I can't tell a customer of mine that their barn wood will be on time even if I have to go to the barn to accelerate the process, when my subcontractor supplier doesn't let me know which barn he's procuring the barn wood from.

It sounds like they do know which bumping facility is involved, though, as they made the choice to switch from one in North Carolina to one in California.  While it sounds like there's a hell of a communication breakdown, it also sounds like BFL "didn't know what they didn't know".

There's not really any reason for the packaging facility to assume their client has never heard of a blank alignment wafer and won't be supplying one.  It's possible that the first either the packaging facility or the bumping facility learned about that was when the wafers arrived at the bumping facility.  It's like trying to hurry up the printers when you failed to supply them with the artwork for your job.  Now is the time to make sure that they know exactly what is needed for the remaining steps so they're not delayed by something BFL didn't take into account.

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing Donald Rumsfeld

[Korbman]

Has anything ever gone well for BFL? No doubt a lengthy string of really good luck is right around the corner.

Seems strange that they'd delay five months and then choose to render 16% of their first batch of chips unusable to pick up a week or two(hopefully), but they're the self proclaimed experts.

Goodness no, BFL is terrible at making predictions. I usually take their updates with a grain of salt and add 2-3 weeks onto any date they give. Shipping March 9th? Naw, probably April 6th.

And I agree..killing an entire wafer seems a bit silly, but then again what the hell do I know about chip development. With only 5000 chips, they'll probably only be able to fill June/July orders (assuming they get all 5000).

[beekeeper]

So I really dont see what the big advantage is of destroying 5000+ chips to be able to test, what exactly ?

If they can perform a SHA256 transform?

[creativex]

Has anything ever gone well for BFL? No doubt a lengthy string of really good luck is right around the corner.

Seems strange that they'd delay five months and then choose to render 16% of their first batch of chips unusable to pick up a week or two(hopefully), but they're the self proclaimed experts.

Goodness no, BFL is terrible at making predictions. I usually take their updates with a grain of salt and add 2-3 weeks onto any date they give. Shipping March 9th? Naw, probably April 6th.

And I agree..killing an entire wafer seems a bit silly, but then again what the hell do I know about chip development. With only 5000 chips, they'll probably only be able to fill June/July orders (assuming they get all 5000).

Odds of 100% yield from the first batch of chips? > or < 5%? This makes their early order customer compensation plan seem more like forward looking damage control than anything else.

I don't know too much about chip development either, but this update doesn't pass the common sense test. There's information missing or information being fabricated.