Quote from: the_electronrancher on January 07, 2018, 07:58:07 PM

Your idea about starting at a larger node is a good one, you would certainly want to debug on a cheap process.

Quote from: Entropy-uc on January 07, 2018, 06:48:32 PM

An open sourced transistor layout for SHA-256 would seriously break open the whole competitive oligopoly that exists now. There are plenty of folks with double digits millions from bitcoin at this point that would see the benefit, so fund raising should be feasible.

This I think is the tough part. Bitcoin has changed from a cool open-source environment to ultra-greed mode. Those who have the ability to do this design certainly aren't going to want to do it for free and see some other Chinese or Russian shop take the design, kill them on manufacturing cost so the original project creators get pushed out of business, and then the takers become the next Bitmain on the originator's backs.

That's the whole point of doing the transistor design as open hardware. You eliminate the biggest barrier to entry by putting the transistor layout into the public domain. There still would only be a handful of folks that would go to masks at 10 nm or lower nodes, but they would be forced to keep pricing competitive because there are dozens of entities capable of entering the market.

I am sure you could find faculty that would find this a worthwhile project, and you could easily fund a few spins at an 8 inch 64 nm fab for under $1M. That's 50 BTC. I paid that much as a bounty to fix my FPGA supplier's garbage code back in 2012!