ASIC just means Application Specific Integrated Circuit. So, a burned FPGA is ASIC. A very bad one, but it is still ASIC. If you want to design a real, clean ASIC then you need to take SHA-256 cores, or design your own, and wire them up manually on a wafer / pcb etc.
Uhh..what?
So if I light my gate arrays on fire, they spontaneously turn into integrated circuits that can only perform one task? Wish I would have known that before! Could have saved a ton of money on preorders...
Moreover, your example doesn't actually match your bogus claim searching for a password requires the password to be weak. Finding a random collision would take time proportional to the size of the hash (e.g. on the order of 2^127 invocations of the hash) and you run into problems with their not being enough energy available on earth.
This.
@pcm81 - You have a better chance of winning the Powerball Lottery (if you're in the United States) four times in a row (at 1 / 175,000,000 chance or so) than finding 1 collision.