April 23, 2024

Antminer S9 - another Zynq based bitcoin board

I have been working with an EBAZ-4205 board, but I have heard about other Zynq based Bitcoin miner boards. One is the Antminer S9. Here are my notes:

FPGA and Vivado

I've been fooling around with these boards for 6 months, and now the time has come to look into Vivado and some FPGA programming.

A first look at my boads

As near as I can tell, if I am reading the chip details properly, this is like an improved version of the EBAZ-4205 as follows: The amount of ram can vary depending on what chips are soldered onto the board. Boards may have 1G of ram, but that seems rare. The chips on my EBAZ are marked D9PTK. The Micron decoder tells me this is a MT41K128M16JT part. 2 Gbit (256 Mbyte) as 128 by 16.

Images I see of S9 Antminer boards have chips marked SEC 925 K4B2G16 46F. These are Samsung chips, 2Gbit (256 Mbyte) as 128 by 16. Exactly the same as used in the EBAZ-4205, but here we have two of them, so we get 512M here and we access it 32 bits at a time (so more and twice as fast).

My boards arrived, and one announces that it has 1G of ram!

Chips

The NAND chip is by Micron, 29F2G08A8AEA. This is a 2Gbit (256 Mbyte) NAND flash with an 8 bit interface.

The dram chips are by Micron, labeled 7KN77. The schematic shows these as MT41K256M16HA devices. These are 4G bit chips with a 16 bit interface. So each is 512 megabytes. The pair gives 1G with a 32 bit interface.

There is also a B50612E chip, which is a Gigabit ethernet Phy, originally designed by broadcom. I don't see an actual ethernet chip, so apparently the ethernet is in the Zynq, and is gigabit capable with a proper phy.

We have 9 IO connectors. Usually only 3 have headers. The claim is that there is more IO here than with the EBAZ-4205

Buying one

I ordered two from AliExpress for $25 each, free shipping. This is only $8 more than EBAZ boards in April of 2024. I bought a third on Ebay for $32, expecting it to arrive sooner, but without paying attention that it was shipping from China. It got here the same day as the AliExpress boards, was broken, and I sent it back.

Another board -- the EBAZ-4332

A fellow I have communicated with has an EBAZ-4332, which is yet another Zynq based board with perhaps more memory than the EBAZ-4205. I don't know anything about it.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]