Largecoin was confirmed by ttul to be s-asic, if I remember correctly.
I believe the current claim is that its a custom asic, but of course, whats in a name, a structured asic like fast path I guess is also "custom" and .. application-specific, and its an integrated circuit.. so, it wouldnt be a real lie.
s-asic always seemed the obvious way to go to me, I was even convinced thats what BFL did. Compared to fpga, it seriously lowers per unit cost with reasonable volumes, it has good potential to lower power consumption considerably and the NRE is not nearly as extreme as with a full custom design.
As I read the
ttul post it pretty much says that the current offering is based on sASIC.
One day someone will build a standard cell based ASIC for Bitcoin mining, and that will cost $5-10M NRE and it will be a monster.