Quote from: eldentyrell on April 26, 2016, 11:01:39 AM

That is definitely not true. I have a chip I designed and fabbed through Europractice sitting in front of me right now and neither I nor my company have any connection to Europe.

For a while TSMC would not let them quote US customers, but that restriction was for that one fab only and it has since been removed. The only thing Europe-only is the academic discounts.

Europractice's IMEC team in Belgium (the ones who do UMC+TSMC tapeouts, but not GF) are absolutely top-notch, outstanding people.

I'm glad you were able to catch and correct my error. Admittedly I'm nor really familiar with the merchant terms for one-off designs. I always worked either through academia or with the long-term projects that involved purchasing options for masks and wafers.

WIth SHA256D miner isn't any issue of secrecy or intellectual property. Getting into partnership with some academic institution would not be problem at all. That was what Bitfury did with their first chips. Here's a quick example of a subject for a master thesis or a post-doc paper:

Comparison of combinatorial constant-propagation gains versus passive transmission loses through varying unroll factor in digital circuits with high toggle ratio.

That would be about 75% to 90% of work required to optimize a Bitcoin miner ASIC. For particular example Bitfury used unroll factor 2 in his original chip.