The specific application integrated circuit chips (ASIC) form the trunk network of the Bitcoin mining industry (BTC). Asic machines are made for a single purpose: to solve the SHA-256 Bitcoin algorithm as quickly as possible to collect block rewards.
They are extremely good in that. One of the most used ASIC machines, the S19 antminer, is capable of making 82 billion calculations per second, 820 times the number of stars on the Milky Way. The ASIC manufacturing market of $ 30 billion is dominated by Bitmain. Chinese company machines feed approximately 80% of Bitcoin’s hashrate, according to Theminermag.
But Bitdeer (BTDR) based in Bitcoin, based in Singapore, intends to shake things with the launch of a new Asic chips architecture. These new chips could bring a great leap in efficiency, says the company, while improving transparency in the ASIC manufacturing process.
“The two dominant players [Bitmain and MicroBT] They are both private and very opaque companies, ”said Jeff Laberge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives in Bitdeer, Coindesk in an interview. “They really do not get involved with the media or give any guidance on what they are doing from the point of view of R&D, and that makes it very difficult for final buyers.”
“We want our customers to know where we are in our manufacturing process, what is our road map in terms of new chips designs, where we are in our production cycles,” Laberge said.
Shanon Squires, mining director of Bitcoin’s reception firm, Compass Mining, told Coindesk that a greater visibility of ASIC production would help miners plan new hardware shipments and facilitate predicting the growth of difficulty of Bitcoin. “Bitdeer’s commitment to transparency is excellent for the mining industry,” he said.
“While Canaan reveals its annual sales volume for several mining models, Bitdeer takes a step further by providing more frequent delivery updates,” said Wolfie Zhao, Director of Research at Theminermag, to COINDESK. “Although both are smaller players in the hardware market, their efforts show good faith in promoting transparency. With luck, this will encourage the largest market holders to take note. ”
Looking for efficiency
ASIC chips have mainly used the same plan since 2014. During the last decade, the greatest increases in ASIC energy efficiency have reached at the foundry level, since the Global TSMC chips manufacturer leader has refined its manufacturing process. While miners have also made alterations to chips design, such modifications have only generated incremental profits.
Even so, progress has been tremendous. The first Asic, Avalon (2013) in Canaan (2013) had an energy efficiency of 6,000 joules by Terahash (J/TH). Bitmain Hydro S21xp Hydro, the current most efficient machine in the market, has an efficiency of 12 j/th.
Bitdeer, which appears in Nasdaq, wants to create a completely new architecture for its ASIC. “We feel that it will be necessary to enter what we call the efficiency range of a single digit,” Laberge said, referring to mining platforms with less than 10 J/TH in efficiency.
Climbing with the traditional plan means using progressively thinner chips. But the thinnest media are more likely to be defective and lot yields tend to fall. “You are also competing with Apple and Nvidia and some of the world’s largest companies for the same materials,” Laberge said.
Bitdeer’s strategy director Haris Basit leads a team of engineers to create a new framework. Some members of that team worked on designs found in the first Bitmain ASIC chips in 2014: the chips whose architecture became the standard throughout the industry. (Bitmain did not respond to a request for comments).
Bitdeer’s investigation has already had successes. The most recent product of the company, Sealminer A3, achieved an energy efficiency of 9.7 j/TH during performance tests, the company reported Monday. That means that the A3, which still uses the traditional ASIC Plan, could end up taking the Hydro S21XP efficiency crown.
However, the Mining Sealminer A4 is expected to use the new company chips architecture, consume 5 J/th. It will probably be the most efficient ASIC machine on the market by a significant margin.
“People have known for a long time you could recycle [the electric] Load on a chip, but no one has been able to discover how to do it in a way that allows high performance … We have deciphered the code on how to do this in a very high performance application, “Basit told the Coin Stories podcast in December.
“Instead of just using [charge] Once and downloading it, we use it several times, four, five, six times. Then we have [a] 75-80% improvement in efficiency in doing so, ”Basit added.
“Our Sealminer A4 chips will use this technology, but it must also be applied more generally in digital chips, especially digital chips that are highly active, such as GPUs and signal processing chips.”
Manufacturing chips
Asic is not easy. The Bitdeer research team is divided into two units (one in Singapore, another in Silicon Valley) that operates in new chips designs. “For such a simple machine, all it does is solve the SHA-256 algorithm, it is extremely complicated to design. We have some of the best engineers in the world working on this, ”said Laberge. The company spends approximately $ 6-8 million on trimester research.
Until now, the company has been delivering new products at a fast pace. Bitdeer expelled both the Sealminer A1 and the A2 in 2024 and hopes that the A3 will enter mass production in the last half of 2025. He says that the A4 should reach the adhesive tape (the last stage of its design process) in the third quarter of the year, with a launch probably at the end of 2025 or early 2026.
When a new chip design is finished, Bitdeer sends the plans to TSMC. The Taiwanese firm is not only the largest chips manufacturer in the world, but it is also the most advanced at a technological level, which makes the Bitdeer association crucial.
“You can’t go to TSMC and say: ‘Hey, I want 100 chips exahash in the next three months.’ There is a process to go through that,” Laberge said. “You enter and ask them for the assignment of chips, and they will give it based on priority.”
Once you have the plans in your hand, TSMC produces a mask, which essentially functions as a chip template, such as the plane in a printing press. The mask is sent to Bitdeer along with risk chips (a small chips batch that the company can use for the tests) to ensure that the design works correctly. If the company needs any design alteration, it is when it happens. In that case, TSMC makes corrections based on Bitdeer’s comments and sends a new mask with new risk chips. All this happens at a significant cost. Bitdeer spent $ 14 million on the A2 cap and $ 26 million in the A3.
When Bitdeer is satisfied with a design, TSMC uses the mask to produce mass wafers. Laberge compared the wafers with the sheets, each with hundreds of chips. Technically, a mask can be used to create an almost unlimited number of wafers, but TSMC has finite resources and can only produce a certain number of chips, so companies end up competing for them.
One of the advantages of A4 design, according to Laberge, is that it is supposed to facilitate the company’s chips allocation process. “[Basit] He challenged the team to create a new architecture that did not need to undergo the latest TSMC processes, but could step back to a couple of generations, which would allow us to use a much less demand node, “he said. A semiconductor node is basically a specific version of the company’s chip manufacturing technology; TSMC is constantly building new nodes in an effort to refine its processes.
Bitdeer takes approximately three months to receive its mask and risk chips after sending its design for the first time to TSMC. Then, the company is another three or four months to receive its chips once it has given the La Light Green Foundry for mass production. Chips are sent directly to Bitdeer manufacturing facilities in Asia. From there, mining platforms can take four to eight weeks to be completely built and packaged.
Pointing to the top
Despite all the costs incurred during production, part of the capital required for the manufacture of ASIC comes from Bitdeer customers.
Miners interested in buying Bitdeer Asics generally deposit a deposit from 25% to 50% of the total cost of the order. The production cycle tends to average six to seven months, so the company does not take long to recover its funds and obtain profits.
Building Asics also creates advantages for Bitdeer’s own miners. Until recently, the company, which was founded in 2021, focused on the accommodation business, which means that it provided facilities for other Bitcoin miners to place their platforms. Bitdeer is slowly leaving that model and expanding its own mining operations along with its Asic manufacturing arm.
The acquisition of ASIC is typically the most expensive part of the construction of a Bitcoin mining operation. These machines usually only last about three or four years before the newest models make them obsolete, so Bitcoin mining companies constantly seek more.
Bitdeer can not only significantly reduce these costs by producing their own machines, but also has the option of selling its mining platforms to other companies depending on their needs.
In the future, Bitdeer aims to give Bitmain and Microbt a race for their money, and interrupting what Laberge called the Asic market duopoly. “We want to be the best player on the market, absolutely,” Laberge said. “We believe we have the team and technology to do that.”
Update (March 14, 2025, 15:30 UTC): The cost of the Sealminer A3 adhesive tape was added.
