I suspect this is a clever way to sell more Avalon chips (they're over $100 each if memory serves).
I remember reading that the chip was designed by a kid at NYU-Poly. How is a college student able to design and manufacture such an awesome chip?
I remember reading that the chip was designed by a kid at NYU-Poly. How is a college student able to design and manufacture such an awesome chip?
A really really good implementation is probably harder but I think the intersection of engineers with the required design skills, access to the design tools, access to foundries and people interested is bitcoin is minimal.
In terms of what students would learn from this project: it would be some fairly straightforward sequencing and buffering logic and the weird combinational munging that hash algorithms tend to do. I think there's more to be learnt by building the little CPU. And we have quite a few sophomores who may not appreciate what a cryptographic hash function is and why we might be interested in building a hardware accelerator for it. We could possible do some extra sessions, introduce them to hash functions, motivate hardware accelerators and so on but it seems like it's not worth the trouble.
I think this assignment would be more suitable for a crypto/security course in an EE department.