FPGA's however are not excessively hard to design nor are they
enormously
expensive to fabricate. My memory is quite rusty on this but I seem
to
recall a non-profit group wanted to attack the distributed.net
problem
from a new angle. Rather than using a large number of commodity PC's,
they had something like 10-15 FPGA's (field programmable
gate-array's,
task-specific processors that can be reprogrammed on the fly) with
very
specific instruction sets on a special PCB that connected directly
to a
normal PC (I don't recall how).
EFF's "Deep Crack" was based on FPGAs, and was used to brute-force
56-bit DES encryption in less than 3 days. They used similar hard to
help the distributed.net effort. See <http://www.eff.org/descracker/>
for more info.
Sorry, as I understand it Deep Crack was built using ASICs - that's
pure custom silicon, not FPGAs. FPGAs are a more recent development
and are much cheaper than ASIC design, assuming your intended task is
not excessively complex.
--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: chromi(_at_)chromatix(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
website: http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline: The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.
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