Weekly Update 1/29/14
We now have a team of engineers and a project manager working with eASIC and our other vendors to get this project completed as soon as posible. We are expecting to add 1 to 2 Petahashs of mining in Q2.
Questions:
Have you had any sample chips at any point? If so, did they work?
No
When are sample chips expected? Sample, low volume and normal production estimate dates?
We have changed the 28nm to a full custom to be more competitive. We now have a full team, engineer and project manager working on pushing the 28nm project as fast as we can.
How long do you expect board design and production to take?
We will have the board ready when we have the 55nm chips, the design will be used on the 28nm chips also.
In your progress report of November 30th 2013 you stated "We have this last week shipped our first products to customers." - What product was shipped?
We shipped some accessories products to India.
What reason caused the change of plans and alteration of schedule? Were your initial timeline commitments too optimistic or was there a catastrophic failure? (if so, what?)
No, the timeline was not too optimistic and there was not a catastrophic failure. In September with bitcoins @ 140, with competition with 400 GH/s and 500 GH/s chips our machines would not ROI, so a decision was made that we would have to refund all of our pre-orders, so we did not commit a lot of our funds to building boards, we was also trying to get enough pre-orders to make our minimum lot with eASIC.
If you are still at the design phase now, what have you been doing for the last 6-8 months?
We now have a competed design, so we are not in the design phase now. Finding the right engineers, transferring shares from BTC-TC, legal problems with the Bitfunder shutdown, making sure that when we spun up our chip it would work, fighting all the FUD on bitcointalk, etc.
Are you in a position to be able to refund your customers every penny or have you spent some of the pre-order money? (Partially answered by Bargraphics trip report)
We have the funds to refund 100% of our pre-orders.
Is preorder money converted to BTC or kept as fiat?
Pre-Orders in fiat are keep in fiat at the moment.
Up until a week or so ago, Ken was telling people if they ordered TODAY they would receive a miner in feb/march - Is this still the case?
No,
Ken mentioned additional hashrate came online in November, what machines were those?
CEX.IO
When was the new engineering firm engaged?
December
Can you give us a rough timeline of the full design and creation process, where we were set back, and what part of the process flow we are looping back over now.
Yes, we expect the 55nm chips in Q2, 28nm in Q3. Our RTL is complete.
Is there a problem with eASIC's 28nm process?
No, but due to competitive reasons we had to move to a full custom 28nm
Did we face delays because Intellihash is being incorporated or is it because the boards weren't designed properly to begin with?
No, Intellihash did require some code to be added, but there were other reasons also that required some code to be written.
Who exactly is the Engineering Firm that was hired, and how long ago did this hiring take place?
We no long release the name of our vendors, due to some investors and customers bugging them. We hired them in December and it took a couple of weeks. We had to learn some lessons from the first engineers we hired.
Can you summarize your meetings with eASIC and the PCB engineers?
No, that would be under NDA with eASIC and NDA with the engineers.
ActiveMining-PR Staff
