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Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

Not for sale, not available... wonder where this $5 price is coming from?

5USD is doable ball-park figure. Doable price even if using our own in-house manufacturing in Germany. Volume production in Asia can be way below of course.

ice40UL1K is a $1.60 for a single bga unit on digikey. Probably well under a dollar wholesale. Add in a few cents for a crystal, some capacitors, pin headers, a vreg, and the pcb, probably costs $1-2 to produce.

I should mention that someone capable of doing hobby level bga work could easily make their own at around $30 through a pcb batching service. In terms of electronic complexity, it looks pretty trivial.

Didn't you mean $3?

Instead of 30? No, it typically costs a lot to do one-off pcbs. Even through a batching service (where you share a large panel with other people), they'll still usually make you pay for a few of them. Also, all of the components are going to cost way more if you just want to buy one of each. Headers are tenths of a cent per pin but from digikey you'll probably have to buy a strip for a dollar or so. Likewise with crystals, vregs and caps.

its 4 layer PCB with 275 micron via pad and 75 micron mechanical drill. I am not joking our PCB fab confirmed its doable technology for them.

I think many PCB fabs will say they can do it, the question is how much they will charge. 75 micron drill is crazy.

PCB confirmed the "DIPSY easysolder PCB" deliver on 20th july, this is special downgraded version of the PCB, 2 layers, drill 0.15, trace space 50 micron..

OSH Park (probably the most well-known such service) costs $10/square inch for a 4-layer board, for three copies of a board.

As a ballpark figure, this board should be no larger than 1/5 square inch, so that's $2, for three boards.

Agree on low volumes of the other components, although things like Seeed Studio's Open Parts Library (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/OPLopen-parts-library-catal...) is pretty nice for the very basics.

Update: Didn't check if this board meets OSH Park's limitations.

In general you can't really do bga with osh park without fudging their specs significantly. Some have been able to do it but you tend to end up with peeling traces. Also, don't forget shipping on all the bits and pieces.

production cost maybe? But yea, I wonder too. Anyways, it would be really nice for mining strange algorithms, especially if at that "price"

I (scare-)quoted the price in the title now, to indicate that it's not very certain.

The FPGA in question seems to cost less than $2 here in Sweden in unit quantities (from Digi-Key: http://www.digikey.se/product-detail/en/ICE40UL1K-SWG16ITR50...), so at least that component by itself doesn't have to blow up the parts cost.

No, this is targeted towards consumer, mobile devices. For cryptographic use you want small process, high bin, typically extremely large and expensive chips. The thing has integrated LED drivers, it's about as far from what you want for that application as you can get.

Quite handy for covert data exfiltration by modulating a "power" LED, though.

Probably easier to use the GPIO in your micro controller to transmit it with RF, unless you've also designed a Faraday cage phone.

The UART on this speaks IrDA natively, which would be a much more attractive target for covert exfiltration.

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