Informations:Thema: Monarch Information
from BFL_Josh:
There's been a bit of a delay at the foundry on our chips and scheduling. The sample chips have been delayed a few weeks (still waiting on an exact date), so this should only affect the earliest customers, who we've already contacted with regards to the delay. The majority of customers should not be affected much, if at all.
When I have a specific date from the foundry, I will post an update here with a revised timeline.
We still expect to ship the bulk of the orders in/around February. Anyone ordering now will probably not get their order until March or April, just as an FYI and in the spirit of trying to keep realistic expectations on shipping times.
Due to the delay for the earliest people, the ones affected will be upgraded to
the watercooled version for free. The watercooled Monarch will be a closed loop system, so no maintenance will be required.
BFL_Josh 12-09-2013, 03:30 PM at BFL:Last week, we met with the foundry to go over details of the delay and reach a definitive conclusion. According to the foundry, we should have the first chips on January 9th (still determining specific quantity), but we will be taking delivery of more wafers every week after that, so it really shouldn't affect anything as far as wafer availability goes, regardless of how many come on the 9th.
At that point, chips are shipped to slicing, packaging and bumping, which is estimated to take roughly a week. After that, they are sent to our ASIC design team for testing. This may take up to a week, possibly longer but we believe it will be less than a week for chip bring up. Once the chip(s) are verified working and properly binned, they are sent to our facility in Chicago for mounting on boards and send to several places for more testing and final firmware programming. This should take another week or so. Once that is completed, we will begin shipping product - during this entire time, more wafers will be rolling off the line and going through the same process, so we should have plenty of chips available and ready to go by the time the units are actually ready to be shipped. I don't yet know what that count will be specifically, but it should be a fairly significant portion of the pre-orders. At this point, it looks like the only hold would pose a problem is if the chip didn't work properly for some reason, but we have no reason to believe that is going to be a problem, as the chip is based on our proven 65nm desgin.
As usual, all of these times and dates are estimates only. It may take more time, it may take less time for each step, but that is the timeline we are working under right now, but it is subject to change.
Right now, the plan is for everyone that has a current pre-order, you will be upgraded to the water cooled version of the Monarch for free to compensate for the slight delay.BFL_Josh 01-04-2014, 11:09 AM at BFLSince I haven't updated this in awhile, I just wanted to put in a quite update and let everyone know that we are still on target for the chips rolling out of the fab on the 9th of January.
As soon as I hear something more, I will update here... but the 9th is still the day. As I said above, it will take ~1 week to get the chips sliced and packaged hopefully before we can begin chip testing in earnest... hopefully less than a week, but we all know how that goes.
