Building one's own ASIC miner??

[mitchell1202]

Would it be possible for one to build ones own ASIC miner. I don't know much about them. What makes them more special than just a GPU rig? How would one go about building their own?

[1714618842]

1714618842

[Akka]

Have you even tried googling ASIC before asking that question?

It's obvious that you don't even know what an ASIC is.

[federicoaa]

You technically can, you just need tons of money and knowledge (or even more money to hire people with knowledge)

To explain better, an ASIC is a specific integrated circuit you design and fabricate.
For making one, you will usually need a team of engineers working full time, you need specific software like Cadence that costs a fortune on license.
Once you go to fabrication stage, that is the most expensive part, because you need to go with a foundry (usually TSMC) and pay millions of dollars to get in production.
From the foundry you get wafers with many chips inside, which you have to dice, package, and test.
Then the chips go to a board with connections and cooling system.

Design phase may take up to a year. Fabrication takes 1~3 months.
I'm not sure about the cadence license, because I have free access in my lab, but I've heard the full suite is like $100k per year. The mask set for fabrication in TSCM 65-nm is about 2 million dollars and each silicon wafer has a price of $10k each.

Anyway, here I'm trowing at you some numbers I have in my head, some may not be very accurate since I'm student to I have all the above for free, but basically, if you want to make ASICs, you alone can't, you need to create a start-up to raise the funding necessary to cover all the expenses. 

[fuW19dxlim16]

The cost you are talking about are for massive production right ?
I think OP was talking about building just a prototype for personal use.

It wouldn't have to be miniaturized (one can easily find some square meters to put a miner if it is profitable).

I know nothing about ASICs, I just read the wikipedia page, and I am not good in electronic either, but mining algorithm aren't secrets.
Would it be so hard to build a mining chip with basic electronic components ? (I guess the answer is yes, else someone would already have done it)

[federicoaa]

The cost you are talking about are for massive production right ?
I think OP was talking about building just a prototype for personal use.

It wouldn't have to be miniaturized (one can easily find some square meters to put a miner if it is profitable).

I know nothing about ASICs, I just read the wikipedia page, and I am not good in electronic either, but mining algorithm aren't secrets.
Would it be so hard to build a mining chip with basic electronic components ? (I guess the answer is yes, else someone would already have done it)

No, with basic electronic components you cannot achieve any significant speed, and also you will need a warehouse to put your circuit XD. You need to use integrated circuits, as you are likely going to use millions of transistors.
There is a first payment that is the same whether you make 1 or 1 billion chips.

[j_gillard]

I love the idea of making it out of components I'm doing electronics at Uni and I Uni I've just decided my project for next year

[John (John K.)]

federicoaa pretty much summed the situation up correctly.