Definition
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner is a specialized type of computerized mining rig that is used to mine Bitcoin (BTC) and other types of cryptocurrency.
Understanding the Term
Crypto mining is carried out by CPUs and GPUs; however, presently, the new Bitcoin (BTC) currency is created by verifying the blocks via the Proof-of-Work (POW) consensus mechanism. The computing power required to mine cryptocurrency at that level is beyond the capabilities of regular computers.
Therefore, ASIC miners were built specifically to complete the mining process much faster and more efficiently than traditional computers, which can no longer keep up effectively for, say, large-scale crypto mining. ASICs are quite expensive to design and manufacture, with some of the most efficient designs costing several thousands of dollars.
Some of the most popular ASIC manufacturers are ASICminer, Bitmain, Innosilicon, and MicroBT.
Takeaway
The main advantage of ASIC is reduced chip size as a large number of functional units of a circuit are constructed over a single chip.