Photonic SHA256 ASIC Implementation

[lucaselc]

Hi everyone,

I’m studying photonics in my university course, and I’ve recently developed an interest in integrated photonics.
I decided to focus my final graduation project on photonic computation, combined with another field of interest to me: Bitcoin BTC.

My goal is to design, at least in simulation, hardware capable of performing SHA-256 hash calculations using photonics — ideally fully optical and, if possible, leveraging WDM-based hardware parallelism.

Do you have any concerns about my project?
I would like to hear feedback from an outside perspective.

Any advice is welcome!

[jstefanop]

Many have looked into this, there was a startup a while back that raised millions to dev a photonic bitcoin chip, but they obviously didnt go anywhere.

Photonics are only good for high bandwidth interconnections. Physics/manufacturing processes are not there yet to minimize the photonic elements to transistor sizes needed for a truly "photonic" hash engine.