Received photos of a specialized Avalon Bitcoin processor chip

    2 months ago, I wrote that the first customers began to receive specialized computers for mining / supporting the Bitcoin network - Avalon. I immediately wrote to Avalon’s developer, Yifu Guo, and he agreed to send me some chips to open. However, the package was mired in the abyss of Russia’s slopost.

    Fortunately, needbmw contacted me - it turned out that Avalon came to him with one damaged chip, they unsoldered it and gave it to me bypassing the mail. Now we can finally take a peek at the insides of the processor. This will be especially interesting to many who want to develop their Avalon with blackjack and mow millions.

    Photo

    The damaged chip itself: (fortunately, the brain of the crystal is not affected).
    This baby counts 282 Mhash / s (like an AMD 6970 graphics card), consuming ~ 2.5 watts.


    It is known from open sources that the chip was manufactured at the TSMC factory using the 110nm manufacturing process, 5 layers of metallization. What is noteworthy, the contact pads on the chip are much larger than the findings on the chip. Most of them are power / ground, respectively, one leg is connected to several pads on the chip.

    The crystal size is 4.06 * 4.12 mm.

    From above - we see only the power / ground distribution network, the whole "stuffing" is hidden under metal connections.



    If you bleed metallization - it is clear that Avalon is a huge monolithic piece of logic, no memory blocks, registers ... This is not a processor in the usual sense of the word. The box on the left side of the circuit is probably PLL (external clock frequency multiplier) and auxiliary logic. But the most interesting thing can be seen if you look at the microcircuit under the maximum magnification (even though all the details are not visible): If we compare with the microcircuit manufactured using technology 180nm based on the library of standard cells, scaled up to 61%, we see that Avalon's logic is much, much denser:











    Summary

    Avalon is real (not to be confused with ButterflyLabs, which have been feeding everyone breakfast for more than a year).

    Despite the fact that Yifu Guo assures everyone that everything has been done in a hurry - the density of logic hints that at least some elements or blocks were drawn by hand.

    So, if someone is thinking of taking the finished Verilog description of the open source Bitcoin FPGA reader, and synthesizing their Avalon automatically, it’s not so easy to create a competitive product, and the automatically synthesized version on the same process will be 2-4 times slower (at the same power consumption).

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