Specialized Blockchain Hardware Leveraging FPGAs is announced

Specialized Blockchain Hardware Leveraging FPGAs is announced

Squirrel Research labs has announced that it is working with Xilinx, Inc for special purpose hardware for blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

Squirrels Research Labs (or SQRL) , is a research and development division of Squirrels LLC.  SQRL is building the next generation of cryptocurrency mining hardware by improving overall hash rate and performance at lower power consumption.

Shipment of new devices will begin this summer at its Northeast Ohio facility. These devices will be processed and fitted with customer requested modification before shipping, announcement said.

Squirrels Research Labs president David Stanfill said, “We saw a significant opportunity to enter into the largely unknown FPGA (field programmable gate array) cryptocurrency market by leveraging Xilinx FPGAs. FPGA-based Blockchain solutions are different than standard FPGA uses like satellite deployments and high-frequency trading. Any error with traditional uses would be devastating. However, the distributed nature of blockchain makes it particularly impervious to errors. We were able to take advantage of this to accelerate the blockchain performance with modifications to unlock all of the chip resources.”

FPGA hardware from Xilinx are generally used for applications like live video transcoding, data analytics, genomics and machine learning. These FPGA (Field programmable gate array) are also applicable and highly effective for cryptocurrency mining.

Stanfill said the Xilinx relationship plays a key role in future Squirrels Research Labs plans.

“Our knowledge of the cryptomining space enabled us to work with Xilinx to have a blockchain-optimized product that falls outside of the typical FPGA use case and to invest in making the solution broadly available. We have further plans in the hardware space, and this helps us get there.”,  Stanfill further added.

Xilinx is the inventor of the FPGA (field programmable gate array), programmable System of Chip (SoCs), and adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP). Its highly-flexible programmable silicon, enabled by a suite of advanced software and tools. It helps in driving rapid innovation across a wide span of industries and technologies - from endpoint to the edge to the cloud.


PC:snip from http://squirrelsresearch.com/

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Mandar is a seasoned software professional for more than a decade. He is Cloud, AI, IoT, Blockchain and Fintech enthusiast. He writes to benefit others from his experiences. His overall goal is to help people learn about the Cloud, AI, IoT, Blockchain and Fintech and the effects they will have economically and socially in the future.

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