Bitcoin Forum

okay, before everybody yells SCAM, I'm just throwing down an idea.. open-source community asic miner - now I bought pre-orders from bfl & and bAsic, and not avalon (agh), but avalon isn't even shipping... alot of miners just lost a lot of money


now before you start saying an asic is too hard, google is your friend, 99% of the work has been done and the startup costs are not out of control


please read http://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/NIST/2010_11/ASIC_benchmarking_Patrick_Schaumont.pdf -  some pricing data (yes outs of date)




there are also numerous sha-256 cores available, are we going to let avalon continue the monopoly?

What do you estimate those costs to be? Have any sort of preliminary plan on how you would go about this? Manufacturing? Chip design? Business plan?

"If it were easy, everyone would be doing it!" -Un Known

Yes I do have a plan, but I also am looking to see about a community driven effort, at a bare minimum, I will put together a plan for a prototype that is close to the avalon in terms of speed/hash

a lot of places do fpga to asic, so I will be leveraging the work that has already been done, and there are several High speed asic designs available, but they need to be changed to work as a miner (double sha-256)

I will be contacting UMC & TSMC, identifing the missing key points needed.  Locating resources to fill in the gaps, and in tandem start looking at the financials... avalon's "Batch" processing actually is very cost-effect - MOSIS offers low qty chips, so we could get a design done and put down into a chip for testing pretty quick

For the costs...MOSIS starts at $50k, goes up from there, I have spent a lot of time sorting through all the requirements and existing designs and limitations and also what is required to make a FASTER unit than avalon that scales

 This would be a great idea if it was on Kickstarter.

doing that now



also just some info - the goal is not to do a full custom asic, but rather leverage an existing core/technology or SoC and put in the development effort to adapt it for mining

I have reached a key point in this potential project - it is definitely possible that this can be done and be brought to market within 6-9months (or less) - and it could be 10x faster than avalons current line up

however I would need some additional people with some specific skillsets
 

this will be on kickstarter - need to decide best business plan as well, either hosted, cloud, or just selling miners....


I'm looking at units at 600Ghash/s to 800Ghash/s EACH - little longer to develop and a little more costly but the wait would be worth it -

Yes, but at what price point?

While doing your design work, think about a scrypt-based miner too (yes, I know you need a bit of fast memory).

ASIC costs literally millions of dollars to develop, I wish you the best of luck though you will have a pretty long road to get there.

Does sound awesome. The problem is getting enough backing on kickstarter and enough community trust in order to get funds together to make it work. The bulk of those that would be interested would be the people already fairly well in-the-know about the current ASIC situation.

With the trials and tribulations (and downright misleading information) that has happened over the last 9 months (wow, has it been that long?) there is going to be even MORE skepticism the second time around.

I think bASIC was wanting a similar idea to have a lot of things 'taken care of' by other companies but it apparently became a nightmare and Tom imploded under it all.

Link the kickstarter project and let people make their choices. It may be that the most funding will come after BFL ships when there are more ASIC owners looking for something else to 'invest' in :)

I am also interested in contributing to this.

I think we can get a much smaller quantity of asic chips by using what is essentially a cybershuttle program:

http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/cyberShuttle.htm

Taiwan semiconductor offers this, and the original 4000 chip run for avalon run 1 was done using this service as far as I can tell.  

That should bring the cost down to $20,000-$40,000 if the FPGA conversion can done on the cybershuttle service.  Thoughts?

ill be the cheerleader

seriously this is great guys

As a guy who works on ASICs/FPGAs for a living, I wish you luck. It sounds to me like you're being overly optimistic on the amount of time and money required to produce a working chip.

Yes, SHA256 is easy. What isn't easy is all the cell placement, wire routing/sizing, silicon doping parameters, etc etc which all feed in to your final achievable performance.

To get the performance hash rate I mentioned, it would be a custom asic - depending on the batch size the cost could be from $1500 to $4500 for a 600Ghash/s to 1.2THash/s - yes its a multi-million dollar project - so it wouldn't be taking the bAsic approach after all - think about it - ASIC's round 2, it would blow the doors anything in the market place today

I've run the numbers and while we could get a "avalon" like unit out the door in 3 to 6 months, why not invest in something that will blow it away but at double the time to market....

Not overly optimistic - for a high speed asic, it is more costly and more timely - for an "avalon" clone - it can be done quicker and cheaper using a different approach - but would an avalon clone be worth the effort compared to an avalon killer?

Since you work on asic's, you know what it takes to go from 60Ghash/s to 600Ghash/s and what the technical changes requirements are.

I'll have the final cost numbers on doing it through this program Tuesday/Wednesday, there are several solutions that offer a lower NRE like this, I'm compiling the data from them all will, different solutions will produce different results (hash speed/heat/power consumption) and different cost

I'm not clear on where the difficulty lies: is it the chip design? The cost of getting the chips created? The board layout?
I'm honestly surprised that ASICS aren't more common.

btw...Virtex7 anyone?

why don't you help this community get a hashing asic into your hands then

plenty of designs are already available to copy with minor changes

its just hard to find someone to make the goddamned wafers for a decent price afaik

OpenBitASIC project claimed to have come to the same conclusion.  They could not find a fab for a reasonable price.



Edit: 


There are a few highly experienced asic people here.  Such plans and designs would have to be vetted by them before I would consider backing the project.

Hey, I really encourage you to go and Make the project a Reality, please don't let the troll from avalon or butterfly or others to derail your effort and hard work. All of these involved pretty much 2 elements, time and money. Coming out high hash rate is the way to go and make sure it also can mine other crypt o coins. Don't let the foundry or factories block your path to success and we need to break the monopoly of those 3 guys.

Sounds good, what other conditions do you require to back the project?

So when you say community asic project, are you thinking about something like AsicMiner?

Interesting :) still which I was at my old job. They were manufacture...they built lens crafting equipment. We had an R&D department that I could of asked questions too :)

No, I was thinking that the would be in the hands of the investors, but I'm not opposed to an idea like as asicminer

No it doesn't. Avalon designed a 110nm ASIC with NRE costs around $200-300k.

i m working on similar thing but it seems not an easy task....

where we at OP?

Any word? I know there are a number of these prototyping "shuttle" fab houses, but I do not know the process they use to consolidate each individual contributor's design into a completed "composite" design for the shared ASIC chip.

I quit reading after "okay, I'm just throwing down an idea..."

Do we run this idea by local community college first ?

okay, u got me on that 1

Yea, lots of EE PhD's at the local CC!   ::)

OP went off and ordered himself some Avalon chips.  Join the project in my signature.

See, while I enjoy the thought of that, I don't think there are too many EE's, excluding myself, on these forums.

I'm not trying to be a downer, and I want people to learn, but I just see a lot of people with no design experience, or even electronics experience throwing down tons of money to start a project they truly don't know how to start. Plus many of them think that it will be the same process as for a FPGA or that they can "use" the open source FPGA designs to begin their initial designs.

Again, not trying to be pessimistic. If you are dedicated and are willing to commit the time and effort to make the project work, and learn (quickly) along the way, you will do well.

We Engineers must unite in a thread or Google Hangout and share our ideas or something of the like and bring it back here to the forums. I think that would be effective.

With the avalon chip hitting the mass's sooner or late, I've been working on some PCB designs for them...

for this gen 2 asic design, for $5mil we could design/build a very fast chip, for $500k a slow chip :-) - but I don't think there is enough support to get this off the ground ATM

5 million if you didn't screw up, and if you're lucky.

I don't even know if the pooled resources among this forum would be able to develop the funds to get a new chip fabbed. That's the significant advantage those companies have over us obviously.

I really like your idea as some of my friends and me planned a similar crowd funding project...
If you're serious, we would like to contribute or join a community asic project.

In what part of the world are you located ?

Cheers, and don t let yourself fooled by others with the right people and spirit it is def. possible and it would contribute to the whole Bitcoin community...

And if BFL already made this $5million dollar chip you are wasting all your money.  Is why bitcoin died.