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2024 is nearing the end. Can you offer any status update since the last post?
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Bit of a sad story. We had a working prototype and were doing PCB design for mass production. It was going to be expensive however. We were going to use a FPGA. Initially we thought costs were going to be something like $150 per FPGA chip (plus maybe $30 for other parts, plus $25K for off the shelf "IP" for the FPGA, plus maybe $100K for our own engineering & software). Plus we needed to make a profit, or at least break even. Then we found the FPGA wasn't quite fast enough. The next one up was ~$300 per chip. So if we produce 500 units, the cost base was going to be ~$600 per unit. This would have give us 10Gbit/s, instead of the current 5Gbit/s. It was also slightly technically risky using 3rd party IP we don't control for part of the project and economically risky, in that we might not sell many units if they are $800 each retail. Plus we are aware that 10Gbit/s isn't all that fast (going to 20Gb looked possible in 2025, but maybe at $2000 per unit, as FPGAs aren't cheap at high speeds).
At the same time we became aware of another non-FPGA chip which was claimed to have twice the speed (so 20Bbit/s) for maybe 1/3rd the price. (to be confirmed as we are just guessing for the moment). This chip + it's pricing is going to be released in Dec 2024, it is claimed. So 6x better on a speed per $ basis. Too good it ignore.
So we made the choice to put aside the relatively slow expensive solution and wait for the cheap fast solution.
Note that if there was some customer out their who was willing to give a firm order for 200+ units, we could still do this FPGA solution, as a lot of the risk would be removed. Let us know.
So, disappointingly, we've got nothing for 2024.
But we are still committed to the project.Comment
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