I think another thing to note is locations of everyone in this project.  If you plan on shipping these things around to different people for different things the shipping costs alone may become very large.  I'm in the USA, California.  But it sounds like a lot of you guys are in Europe or Asia... I hate to say it because it may mean it will be more difficult for me to get a board here in the US, but it almost sounds like you guys in Euro/Asia are closer together - and it might make more sense to get everything done semi-close to you guys, e.g. board fab/assembly/debugging.  I'd love to get my hands on one of these myself, so it kind of sucks if us US guys are the minority, but it goes both ways too....  But basically to reduce costs we are forced to centralize things - we can't not buy all the boards at once without it costing much more $$$, same goes for the part orders.  Assembly may not be as bad as li_gangyi seems to have that covered for now.  But again, if he's doing the assembly, and correct me if I'm wrong, he's in Singapore, that may be part of the decision right there.  I could do any soldering/assembly myself, except for the reflow/bga stuff.

I don't mind putting up some money for prototyping, but without getting any hardware myself I'd be much less likely to put money up ( I imagine I'd only want to part with USD$100-$200 if it meant I wouldn't see anything for a while - plus I'd love it if that meant I got some sort of discount later or guaranteed first production run etc... ).  If I knew I was going to get hardware for this, I may be more willing to spend around USD$300-$500 for prototyping.

Here's a thought - how hard are LX150's to re-sell.  Maybe we should try to acquire enough funds to get the first price break on a batch of 10 of those?  It sounds like we're going to need at least 1-2 prototypes, but it's sounding almost more like we might make 5-6 and ship them around to that various devs.  Dunno how much of a price savings it is, but if everyone is very convinced that's the FPGA we're going to use, then maybe this might be a good cost savings investment now?

edit: seems like @ digikey there is no bulk discounting at all for these chips

On another note to the FPGA devs out here - what FPGA code are we currently going with?  I havn't kept up with the Open Source FPGA Miner project in a bit, have any major improvements be made?  I was thinking about setting up some simulation test benches in Xilinx and trying to further optimize what they've done.  IIRC the design they have made IMO doesn't perfectly match up with the Xilinx architecture - and that's likely why people have been unable to fully maximize/optimize a hashing core for this chip.  I think Xilinx does much better with faster clocks and smaller logic - but I'm by far no guru or expert, this is just my gut feeling - we'd really have to tear deep down into timing analysis and RTL diagrams to really optimize well.