Hardware design is challenging to say the least. Also, hardware engineers are scarce.
I graduated from the top computer college in my country and I can say that only a couple of people from my generation really knew about hardware - that means designing circuits that don't go boom.
Nowadays chip design is computer assisted with programming languages dedicated to that purpose (Verilog and whatnot) but in my experience it's still very esoteric and convoluted, unlike software programming that is more or less accessible to everyone.
Plus, you need all sorts of hardware to get designing like prototype boards, FPGAs and such. Simulators are OK but they can't go very far.
Software is also expensive for this sort of endeavor. Companies like Xilinix charge for the software quite a pretty penny even if it's quite useless without the hardware.
I think that the few good hardware engineers that exist are immediately gobbled up by companies like Intel, AMD and Nvidia...
There are countless companies that will print your PCBs and assemble your product but you need to know how to make it. I've actually known someone who worked with an Israeli electonics company(it seems to me that there are lot of chips built and sold there) and their community is a lot more closed than the software community that is so open and blooming.
Honestly, I thing the way to go would be to find some sort of chip that is massed produced(like Avalon is doing now) that can be installed on a multipurpose platform. Like, let's say you could buy 50 little PowerVR GPUs and plug them into a board and run them for mining. Or a very basic ARM CPU... But large companies are not interested in Bitcoin mining right now and that's for the best, probably.
The raspberry PI for example is demonstrating that there is a demand for more DIY mass produced hardware out there. Who knows, maybe some day little CPUs will be sold like transistors are today.
We need a platform, like FPGAs that can run a multitude of chips and do whatever task we want it to.
Sorry for the lecture guys... Feel free to flame me
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