ZYNQ System-On-Chip Standalone Bitcoin Miner
Team Members Heading link
- Hongjiang Men
- Zijing Xiao
- Tianqi Yang
- Tianheng Zhang
Advisor: Vladimir Goncharoff, PhD
Project Description Heading link
Bitcoin mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger (blockchain) of past transactions so that currency already spent cannot be re-spent elsewhere. Mining gets its name from the fact that those who are first to solve a computationally-intensive algorithm (known as SHA256), which adds a legitimate transaction record to the blockchain, are rewarded with newly-generated Bitcoins. Both processing speed and energy efficiency are needed to make any money from mining Bitcoin. The goal of this project was to build a standalone device whose sole task is to mine Bitcoin. This device only needs an Ethernet cable and power supply to operate and uses the Xilinx ZYNQ System-on-Chip (SoC) as its processing unit. The ZYNQ SoC contains both a fully-functional ARM microprocessor and a highly configurable FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), making it suitable for our purpose. The ARM core handles communications with a Bitcoin mining pool, and the FPGA acts as a fast hardware-based processor to execute the SHA256 algorithm. There are already many FPGA-based Bitcoin mining device designs on the market; what makes our design different is that ours does not require a host PC. An alternative reason for working on this project was to learn more about the Xilinx ZYNQ SoC, which may be useful for future employment. We conclude our work by estimating the cost-effectiveness of our system based on the cost of energy consumed vs. Bitcoins earned and compare it to some other systems that are available in the marketplace.