If nothing else, Scottish mining hardware startup Novello Technologies is ambitious. The company recently announced a $4.2 million fundraising campaign to develop a “family of ultra efficient and affordable Bitcoin mining systems.” The extremely optimistic plan calls for a mid-August tapeout, with packaged prototypes available by October and standard deliveries by December.
With even the most experienced ASIC makers experiencing massive delays in chip production, the Novello plan seems destined for problems on that timeline. As a startup with little more than an idea and a release timeline, there’s reason to doubt that Novello’s plan is realistic.
But what about the hardware itself? Well … there’s not much to say.
The company’s proposed NOVA-S USB Miner exists at the moment as a concept illustration, and the company does not provide any hard specs on their website. The estimated speed of the proposed lowest-end USB stick model is 128GH/s, representing a 10-fold increase over the closest comparable real-world equivalent, the 12GH/s HexFury.
Exactly how Novello plans to achieve such a massive increase is still unclear, although the company has stated that their “custom 40nm technology" can "easily outperform a gate or standard cell based 28nm design.”
Another hard-to-swallow claim is that Novello will retail these miners starting at $59. Thus far, investors have been skeptical of Novello’s claims, and the company has only raised about $4,000 of their $4.2 million goal.