October 2013
October 2013A new page has been turned yesterday in the Bitcoin mining history, as Innosilicon -В a global leader in high speed mixed signal design and the strategic IP partner selected by Bitmine to develop their advanced CoinCraft A1 28nm ASIC mining chip coreВ – sent to Global Foundries the GDS data for the tape out process that will eventually lead to the delivery of the first lot of ASICs in the last week of November 2013. The last few days have been extremely busy both at Innosilicon and Bitmine, where the full chip post-layout simulations, timing and power optimizations plus physical verification have been run to the great satisfaction of both teams before submitting the final data for manufacturing to their selected IC foundry. Thanks to the industry leading low power 28nm knowledge of Innosilicon, who have successfully silicon proven more than 5 high speed chips in 28nm this year alone, the CoinCraft A1 will clearly be the world’s leading bitcoin mining ASIC in power efficiency, with extremely low power usage under 0. 3 W/GH/s in ultra low power mode and 0. 4 W/GH/s in nominal performance. “This core computational unit of this chip is designed using patent-pending, innovative custom VLSI optimization technics unseen in a mining ASIC before. An all analog unit is also designed using a fully custom approach by us. The high thermal tolerance package has been designed and simulated for weeks with full custom frame. Without our leading expertise in the industry for the past decade serving customers worldwide, this would not have been possible. “, said Mr. Gordon Ao, CEO of Innosilicon. “We have taken a completely different design approach towards the mining Hash Unit by marrying innovative parallelism architecture to the latest 28nm VLSI full custom approach in this ASIC: innovations right from front end architecture, in the hashing unit design, and also in the IC package for reliable power delivery and thermal performance, a design that has been optimized to the bone to be fit for the bitcoin mining specific extreme high toggling nature and power dissipation peaks. ”. Whereas Giorgio Massarotto, CEO of Bitmine AG, said: “We are glad that we chose Innosilicon to do it for us considering the great track record they have for various leading edge interface IP they delivered, the tremendous work load and the depth of the expertise in mixed signal full custom design their team has. Obviously as bitcoin mining gets harder, the per Gigahash power efficiency will be key to a miner’s balance sheet. The future of bitcoin mining machines lies in improving the power efficiency which is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It can only be achieved by high speed design experts with VLSI custom approach. Packing hundreds of GH in one ASIC is easy, but to achieve high power efficiency and thermal reliability is not. More and more customers are asking for the best return from their machine’s electricity bills. В So from day one, we kept asking Innosilicon to hand design and hand optimize the core unit utilizing all their engineering expertise in the multi-GHz high speed IP domain. That approach took a huge amount of manpower but has finally paid off. Running at 1 GHz clock for over 32GH/s performance, yet in one small A1 ASIC package measured only at 12mmx12mm with the power consumption being a fraction of other ASICs. We have definitely raised the bar and brought bitcoin mining ASIC technology to a new level. ”CoinCraft A1 ASICs are available in assembled miners (the “CoinCraft Desk” and the “CoinCraft Rig”) and in wholesale lots of ICs, both of them are available for pre-order on their website. Fully detailed specifications and reference design will be released after October 15th.
