sounds like a great idea to me, I've had a thought of a miner company run by miners for the people...not to reap all the benifits selling to the ppl...thought AM was doing a good job, but then they just got blown outta the water and couldn't keep up...I'd invest in it because i believe the way its going right now is if your not hosting these huge machines it'll only be ppl with tons of money to buy these mining machines that will be mining and us little guys will be pushed out, but if you pushed out a great working chip and sold it cheap...then what? are you going to follow thur and make a full miner outta it? or just sell the chip to ppl that will make a full miner outta it and raise the price sky high?
First it would be the asic chip itself that would need to be designed, tested and then fabricated on large scale. Which may include royalties to the designer for each chip sold.
Next would be paying for full open source design of USB type device then 16, 32 and 80 chip devices which can vary. After a few test units were made the project would then be openly available to anyone looking at calling a fab company to have them build these boards for you.
After all developer, design and fabricationo costs the chip itself would then be available to everyone. The group who helped fund this project would be a % based on what I would see viable after I calculated estimations which I believe between a 10-20% markup straight from the factory is very reasonable price considering what we all see currently available chip wise in the market. Before I take my time and effort to really bring this to life I really need this to get a bit more attraction then what i've seen since I opened the topic.
IF you are serious about this and would like to be apart of it send a PM on how much in BTC or post here you'd be willing to use to help fund this sort of project. Of course there is other various options as well in this so please post your feedback and how you would like to see something like this done.