The Canadian company Squire Mining announced on Tuesday in Vancouver, Canada, an alliance with South Korean companies Gaonchips and Samsung Electronics, for the design and production of 10-nanometer ASIC chips for Bitcoin (BTC) mining equipment.

On August 1st, Squire Mining announced that it had contracted a company to design, test and manufacture an ASIC chip for Bitcoin (BTC) mining. This Tuesday, the Canadian company stated in a press release that it chose Gaonchips as the manufacturer of the integrated microcircuits and Samsung Electronics as the producer of the 10-nanometer ASIC chips themselves.

As manufacturing equipment handles smaller scales, the same semiconductor substrate can accommodate more transistors. It is for this reason that the minimum size of the components included in the chip, or the minimum separation between two conductive wires, expressed in nanometers, determines how advanced the manufacturing process is.

While Samsung and other semiconductor manufacturers have begun to produce 7nm chips, these are more expensive than 10nm chips. Although this implies that the respective equipment has a lower hash rate than the 7 nm equipment, the price/performance ratio can be attractive in the competitive Bitcoin (BTC) mining equipment market, clearly dominated by the Chinese manufacturer Bitmain.

Canadian company partnered with Samsung to produce 10-nm ASIC chips for Bitcoin (BTC) mining

Squire programmers and developers are already working with Gaonchips on fine-tuning the first prototype of the ASIC chip, says the Canadian firm. After confirming that the prototype meets all the specifications and design requirements, they would commence the first stage of mass production of the 10-nanometer ASIC chips themselves, operated by Samsung.

The first prototype makes it possible to test the software and check that the final chip will integrate correctly with the other components of the finished Bitcoin (BTC) mining equipment.

For this purpose, a transistor matrix is used, the connections of which are programmed according to the design. This field-programmable FPGA logic gate array precedes mass production. In the case of announced ASIC chips, that FPGA prototype should be ready by the end of the month, says Squire.