Antistatic
Static kills chips with a discharge a person does not even notice. A strap and a mat cost as much as lunch, a dead board costs a month of mining.
Why static is dangerous for an ASIC
A person feels a discharge starting at roughly 3000 volts, while hundreds of volts are enough for a semiconductor. That means you can kill a board with a touch you never registered: no spark, no click, the chip simply took a breakdown.
The nasty part is that death is rarely instant. A chip wounded by a discharge works for days or weeks, then starts throwing errors and drops out. Nobody will ever connect the failure to the fact that a month earlier someone handled the board in a sweater on a carpet.
The worst setting for board work is dry air: winter with the heating on, an air-conditioned room. Synthetics, carpet, and a plastic desk add their share. In surroundings like that, your body builds up a charge from plain walking.
Protection is cheap and boring: a grounded wrist strap, an antistatic mat, boards stored and shipped in shielding bags, not in bubble wrap left over from a marketplace order. Bubble wrap is exactly the thing that accumulates static.
The short version
| Human sensitivity threshold | around 3000 volts |
| What harms a chip | hundreds of volts, an unnoticed discharge |
| Worst conditions | dry air, synthetics, carpet |
| Minimum kit | a grounded strap and mat |
| Board storage | shielding bags, not bubble wrap |
Rules for every day
Strap on your wrist and down to ground before the case is open, not after something has gone wrong.
Hold a board by the edges and the heatsinks, not by the connectors and not by the chips.
Ship and carry boards only in shielding bags: the bag costs under a euro, the board costs a couple of orders of magnitude more.
In winter and in air-conditioned rooms, be doubly careful: dry air is static season.
A case from practice
A client swapped his fans himself in winter, and the ASIC ran fine afterward. Three weeks later the board began losing chips one by one, with no overheating and no marks on the PCB. A classic ESD picture: the discharge hit a circuit during a touch, and the chip died slowly. Now the client has a strap, and we have his board.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
- ASIC Chip and Hashboard knowledge base
Guides
- ASIC Manufacturers knowledge base
Questions and answers
I have poked around ASICs for years without a strap, no problems
Some of the failures you wrote off to age and overheating could have been static: it leaves no traces. Survivorship bias in its purest form.
Is touching a heating radiator before work enough
Better than nothing: it drains the accumulated charge. But the charge builds back up while you work, so a strap beats a one-time touch.
Do I need antistatic gear to swap a fan
The fan itself does not care, but your hands end up next to boards and connectors during the swap. Putting a strap on is easier than guessing afterward.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .