Delay-balanced pre-computation technique for high-performance bitcoin mining
Yi-Teng Chang, Pin-Wei Chen, Cheng-Tsung Chang, Shih-Hsiang Chou, Yu-Hua Yang, Cheng-Yu Tsao, Pin-Lung Tong, Wen‐Long Chin · Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers · 2025
Recently, the secure hash algorithm 256 (SHA-256) has found its application in computation-intensive Bitcoin mining. In this study, we propose a high-throughput and area-efficient pipelined SHA-256 core for the Bitcoin mining, which has almost the same delay in each pipelined stage. In order to enhance the throughput, the critical path of SHA-256 is reduced by applying the delay-balanced criterion. Moreover, the proposed pre-computation technique moves and reschedules some combinational logic to different iterative rounds. Meanwhile, to achieve the goal of area efficiency, the critical path has been determined to be few logic operations plus a 32-bit adder. For comparison purposes, the TSMC 180 nm standard cell library and the synthesis tool of Synopsys Design Compiler are adopted to verify the proposed Bitcoin mining design. The clock frequency and throughput of the proposed architecture are 278 MHz and 284.44 Gbps.