Let's say each manufactured chip would yield 100 MHash/s.
I am pretty sure they can do much more. If a single mid-range fpga can house an entire pipeline and get 50 MH/s, any ASIC must be able to overperform that at least with a factor of ten.
there are specialists out there that will do it for us...and chances of success will be much higher with that approach.
Considering that the design is very simple, and we don't need to push any limits (as we can simply use more chips instead) probably the manufacturer's team could do it relatively cheaply, it's mostly an automatized process anyway.
2) Crowd funding with kickstarter.com -- If we can get 500 people to pre-order one 2 GHash/s board at 1000$ a piece (a truly good deal IMO), we get a 500k$ budget to do #1. We need 10,000 chips. I think the budget makes sense if we spend 250k$ on design, 100k$ on chips (10$ a piece), 50k$ for tape-out (might be included in design cost...we need to see with the contractor), 10k$ on PCBs and assembly + the rest for overhead. Once we get real quote from contractor, we can adjust the cost per board...I'll I'm putting here are ball park figure to show the potential of this approach.
I think the one-time costs are higher. Unless we go for some structured ASIC, which indeed can be done from a few $100K. But the problem with structured ASIC is very similar to the fpgas: we have to pay for all the unused stuff (memory blocks, hardware multipliers, etc) that we don't need, increasing the price and lowering performance. And the projects return would still be threatened by others who starts making real asics.
I am also not sure that hunderds of people would commit the neccessary amount. Buying a video card is a much lower risk, as it can be sold anytime and has uses for other purposes.
So far in my career all I've done is deal with PCB, FPGA and ASIC designs...this project seem very realistic to me. But maybe I'm day dreaming...please bring me back to earth if I'm doing so.
I have only worked with FPGAs, but I don't think you are daydreaming.
btw, does anyone know why the "Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs." topic has been closed?