so I had assumed that all these guys were using standard IP libraries.. If what your saying is true, then its obvious why no one has picked up the IP from a defunct firm and ran with it.

Based on your comment I found a few details... seems like you have a good point

The BFL at 28nm was I guess 400GH/s at .27J/Gh or 1600GHS at .76J/GH ..but the layout size was massive compared to bitmain/bitfury, its seems like in addition to using standard libraries they had a significantly different design methodology

The bitfury at 28nm was at around .2 J/GH and supposedly the 16nm is .1J/GH..
The bitmain 1385 is listed at .18 J/G in 16nm at the slowest speed (21 ghs)

Interestingly Global Foundries (formerly the AMD fab) fabbed the BFL device

I think Jensen (CEO) of Nvidia already has plans to build specialized mining "GPUS" for ether.