People have soldered BGA with blow dryers before  Not that that is the best idea, but just sayin'.

It's not a huge problem, but it's there. The latest design gets 100MH/s (@100MHz) and requires either a lot of air-flow or a heatsink.

I only looked at the circuit image you posted, not the rest of it, so excuse me if I missed something obvious, but why is there an ATtiny on there? FPGAs can program themselves from a flash chip unless I'm mistaken.

Probably what kokjo said, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of making it more generalized. The algorithm can be optimized specifically for Bitcoin, and there are benefits to that which include both increased ASIC performance and reduced cost. What one would have to do is determine how much interest by non-Bitcoin parties there would be in such a chip, and if the cost benefits lost due to supporting a more general approach are out-weighed by the increased demand.

Also, it might be a good idea to keep the ASIC general simply because of risk. If Bitcoin fails to meet exceptions during the production of the ASIC chips, the manufacturer would at least have chips that could possibly be sold into other markets.

On a somewhat related note, I'd like to stress that I greatly believe any ASIC developments should all be done in the open, with open-source/open-hardware licenses on as much of the process as possible up to and including the free release of the masks. Now, that's a pretty bold statement, since the masks are very expensive. But if, for example, the entire venture is publicly funded that might not be such a crazy idea.

Heh, thank you njloof   I really appreciate that.

Quick update: I've been working with makomk's modifications and they do appear to be giving the performance increase and area reduction quoted. In fact, I saw ~75K LEs when I synthesized. Power consumption was estimated at 4.7Watts. Very impressive work! I'm doing another compile now and will do a live hardware test soon, to confirm correct share submission to mining pools.

EDIT: Just tested the new code on live hardware (DE2-115). Works great 

Payments are processed by the generation of blocks, which is done by miners. Client nodes have no impact on the way payments are processed.

I've got a coupon here for a free copy of DiRT 3. Came with a Radeon card I won at E3 

Retail price of the game is $49.99 at Steam right now, so PM or post your offers in BTC.



Thank you!

June 12th, 2011 - Xilinx and VHDL Ports Added
With many thanks to TheSeven and teknohog, their code has been added to the public repo. TheSeven did a re-implementation in VHDL, with support for Xilinx and ISE. teknohog did a straight port of the Verilog code to simply support Xilinx and ISE. Both include Python miner control scripts, and serial port communication with the FPGA board.

I made little to no modification to their code for this first commit. If you appreciate their hard work on this Open Source project, please send them your thanks and donations!

TheSeven: 14Jc8vWq1mPv7vWnP5VquZZgpLEtzW2vja
teknohog: 1HkL2iLLQe3KJuNCgKPc8ViZs83NJyyQDM


Some notes on the current state of this project

As it stands now, the project makes lots of references to the DE2-115 board, and it being the preferred mining platform. Obviously this isn't the case, nor is it meant to be an advertisement. It was simply the first device supported, and the one that currently has a binary release available. In the near future, I will merge in full Xilinx compatibility changes into the main Verilog code and try to steer the project towards supporting many devices and boards in a Plug-and-Mine fashion (like the DE2-115 currently is); or at least Compile-Plug-and-Mine

Also, the directory structure in the repo is not optimal, but that will improve with time as I settle on a structure that fits the project's many needs (multiple code variations, and multiple device specific implementations).

I have many other promising patches to merge, including a few of my own So keep watching this thread!

Great work OrphanedGland And thank you for opening a thread in the Newbies section. It will be a pain to keep track of yet another thread, but I guess it is our only option for now.

If you want, I will happily put your code up on the public repo, if you want it available on there.

Yeah, I'm still fighting with ISE. Using SmartXplorer I got ISE to P&R a fully unrolled mining core into my 6SLX150 chip at 50MHz. ~50% resource consumption all around, which is good. Two problems: A) results returned by the running core were erratic, and B) the chip ran very hot.

Slow progress, but progress none-the-less.

I'm curious if there are enough Bitcoiners attending E3 in Los Angeles this year to warrant a small meet-up? I think it'd be fun to at least hang out a bit at the show and shoot the breeze.

It's a bit late to be asking, since tomorrow (Thursday) is the last day 

Yeah, I know about the random seed, but ... I dunno, that seems too far fetched that the random seed would let it go from completely un-routable, to routing in a few minutes. Then again, I haven't used ISE in a few years, so it may be a lot more temperamental than I remember.

I only did one thing different. I ran each stage one at a time, instead of telling it to P&R and have it automatically invoke all the necessary steps. 

Ughhh. I've got an old version of Synplify Pro that refuses to synthesize the design. First, it didn't like the use of block names  and last I left it, it was optimizing out the entire design, for no particular reason. I might install their latest eval version on a different machine and see if that version has better luck.

Nope, I mean blocks. I threw ~3GH/s at it for a few minutes, and it was running against testnet (Difficulty == 38). Running against pushpool, I got tons of shares but very few blocks (2 blocks with >1000 shares). Running directly against bitcoind it found 3 blocks in a few minutes.

I experienced an odd problem with pushpool.

I got it setup, and accepting shares against a bitcoin --testnet client setup correctly with RPC. So, everything appeared to work. I even found a few blocks, and those submitted fine.

However, at a difficulty of 38, and >1000 shares, it had only found 2 blocks.  That's either really bad luck, or something was broken.

So I tried pointing the miners at bitcoind directly, and they found 3 blocks in a few minutes (as expected for the hashrate).

What size Stratix IVs are they? I don't know how much better the performance of the Stratix parts are. I'd just guess 1.5x faster, so you'd get ~1.5 MH/s per 1,000 LEs compared to the Cyclone series. Maybe more. Maybe less.


The FPGA doesn't care, it just returns nonces that make a hash meet the Difficulty 1 target (H == 0). And no, it isn't checked on the tcl side either. All pools currently operate on Difficulty==1. For solo mining, the script will submit the data, bitcoind will check it, and return an error if it wasn't below the target. So, not too much harm done there.

And yes, I've run it solo before, against namecoind  It found a couple blocks! 

TheSeven: That is some great work you're doing there! I'm glad someone is making a lot of progress with Xilinx devices and Python mining scripts. I haven't had the chance to push your code into the public repo yet, but it is most certainly on my list of things to do.

As a side note, for reasons I cannot understand, my design passed P&R yesterday, even though it failed the last time I tried it. This was a half-mining core (only one SHA-256 pass), at 50MHz. I haven't tested it or anything, but ... I'm just bewildered why it routed without any problems this time. I must have done something wrong the first time. Hopefully it isn't just messing with my head, and I can finally start mining on my SLX150. I'd also like to start testing the DSP48A1 slices, which are rated for 250MHz operation and will perform 48bit + 48bit addition 

Or, in days:


So, if you have 1MH/s, and difficulty is 550,000, then:

Since it hasn't been made clear:


1 Megahash / second == 1,000 Kilohash / second == 1,000,000 hash / second

Ahh, perfect, thank you!

There are currently 81,545 more blocks until the reward is halved. At a rate of 7 blocks per hour (it's supposed to be 6, but we've been averaging much higher) that's 485 more days. Man ... I wonder what Bitcoin will look like in a year's time.

Is there a way to look this up on deepbit's website? I'm kinda curious how many blocks I found

I've recently switched to solo mining, and I'm praying it's actually working correctly right now My 95% probability is 17 days, or 5 days on average, so if I don't find a block in two weeks I guess I fscked something up 

Altera commercial FPGAs are rated for 85C JT.

Yay!

It isn't on the C4-115 chip, but for the tiny C4-22 it might be. Check with PowerPlay. Make sure no heatsink and no fan is selected, and the toggle rate is ~65%. See what it says the JT is.

Well I will certainly double check my math, but you can most certainly compute some of W after the initial 16. Example (0 indexed):


All those values are known and do not change during the course of a work unit. The same applies to w[17] and w[18]. I don't have my notes with me for the rest.