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Exactly Mr. NotFuzzyWarm. I was referring to taking X-rays, etc, to study and make new custom boards to fit in these BW 14nm. But my question is that 'Is using an S7 for reference for the boards a good idea?' and 'What will be the difficulties we'll be facing if I use S7's as a ref.?'
+1 for thinking out-of-the-box but...
To answer directly - it is NOT a good idea to use an Ant hashboard as a reference for a different miner. Probably the only major function block they would have in common is the Vcore power regulators and even that would only serve as a gross reference to how string load balancing is handled.
The best you will get from forensics of an existing miner is knowledge of how that particular design addressed their particular design
problems targets. Yes you will be able to tell how thick various copper layers need to be and how they chose to route signals along with seeing if they took care to shield the signal lines. All that is nice to know but not directly helpful with a new design.
It would be like using an Intel PC mobo as a reference to make a mobo that uses AMD cpu's. Yes the concept of what happens on the motherboards and the input/output from them is the same but the signals methodology and support circuits used with the chips are very very different.
More to the point is that so far no chip maker is releasing data sheets detailing pinouts and com protocols for their chips. That vital piece of information is the starting point for any miner design. There are folks here that know how to make miners (Sidehack for one) and can design all the support circuits the ASIC's use as well as do board layout. Then there is the micro-controller driver coding for everything between the ASIC and the outside world. That is not an off-the-shelf bit of software and is not part of CGminer or BFGminer. But again, there are people here who can do that.
While Bitmain does release data sheets for their chips they do not provide reference designs. Understandable since they actually make miners. But BitFury and BW -- they make chips, not miners so if they want folks to buy their chips (to make miners) why do they not, a) provide full data sheets and b) provide a simple 2-4 chip reference design so folks can see how it should work and then expand on the reference with their own ideas for more/longer string nodes? That is how every other semiconductor mfgr on the planet works...
Having a reference board (or not) and knowledge of hashboard design is not the main problem. Getting the data sheets and chips is.
