Things are heating up in the ASIC race and Butterfly Labs have upped the stakes by releasing a PDF document containing the Draft Communication Protocol for their new range of BitFORCE SC ASIC mining devices.

The document posted today on Butterly Labs forum by staff member BFL_Josh describes how mining software sends SHA256 jobs to the device and how to receive and interpret the results. Current mining software already works with Butterfly Labs FPGA family of devices but the new BitFORCE SC devices have significant changes as to how they communicate.

With the release of this document the developers of mining software such as cgminer can begin to build the drivers necessary to support Butterly Labs devices when they are released.