ACE-2 Alpha 3 - Productization Progress

ACE-2 Alpha 3 is a public productization-progress snapshot built on the unchanged Alpha 2 certified RTL baseline.

Preserved certification

• 18/18 Layer-0 fixed-point operators
• 13,914/13,914 commands across 24 layers and two generated tokens
• exact 23-file RTL tree
• mapped SKY130 100 MHz PASS
• 62,283 cells and 0.614082704 mm2 non-SRAM area

Productization update

The independently accepted S6 BF16 package executed exactly once and failed closed at the synthetic probe checkpoint gate:

• epoch 1: 8/28 hard passes
• epochs 2 and 3: 7/28 hard passes
• no checkpoint selected
• official dev, retention, and holdout not accessed
• terminal taxonomy: PROBE_QUALITY_GATE_FAILURE

S6 is sealed: no retry, resume, rescore, or downstream W4A8 claim is permitted.

The next accepted BF16 successor remains a prerequisite for arbitrary-text W4A8 chat, quantized-reference/RTL agreement, and the later Alveo U280 PCIe/XRT/HBM2 deployment package.

No model weights, checkpoints, datasets, row-level probe outputs, backend logs, private evidence packets, credentials, or proprietary toolchains are included.

See docs/ALPHA3_PROGRESS.md, STATUS.md, and KNOWN_LIMITATIONS.md for the exact scope and non-claims.