Interesting project, but I don't think anyone is going to raise USD $6 million for a SOC.
actually i have a client that has access to VC funding. if an FPGA demonstration is achieved, it unlocks the funding.
we need to do this in stages, basically. you're absolutely right in that nobody is going to just throw money at us, yet more than that, even if they did i would *refuse* to go direct to production without going through some extremely rigorous testing and milestones, first.
you may be interested to know that i've also received an offer by a sponsor to pay for a MVP run. to properly take advantage of that, as it's almost certainly going to be a one-off, i absolutely absolutely have to be sure that the design is viable.
in addition i've applied for a (small, $EUR 50,000) Grant with a "Privacy and Trust" focus. the sole exclusive reason why i was able to apply is the committment to full transparency.
by using the resources of crowdsupply and the libre-riscv mailing list, i will be able to demonstrate to the Non-Profit that yes, the Grant is being used for the purposes that it was intended, and that yes, milestones are being reached.
once we have a fully working FPGA technology demonstrator, and the software side completed (Vulkan), and associated custom instructions needed for a GPU done, *then* we will be able to apply to the same Non-Profit for a Grant of up to $EUR 5 million.
so there are ways (several). promising to be 100% transparent, in the days where people are actually starting to get the message that technology is messing up their lives, has opened up a lot of unexpected doors.
It's still a bit early for Libre Hardware at the silicon level.
yeah this is very much a chicken-and-egg situation. if you look at OR1200, they quotes knew quotes in advance that there was no way anyone would put it into high-end (fast clock rate) production... consequently they didn't bother to make the design decisions that would *allow* it to go into a high-end ASIC.
so mainly it is about belief and committment. decide on the goal, *stick* to it, and go from there. most of the Libre / Open Hardware community simply do not *believe* that they can gain access to 40nm or above, so they do not try.
A lot of people like the idea of Libre designs, but even most of those don't really want to pay a premium for it. Everyone is fine with OSS because it generally also means free as in beer.
well, that's why the processor has been designed as a semi-copy of other commercially-successful SoCs. it targets six separate and distinct markets, which is a strategy deployed by every successful Fabless Semi Company. ST for example do one design, and when certain parts of the ASIC fail to pass testing, they don't chuck it out, they go, "whoops, that bit didn't work, let's chuck it in a smaller package with less pins, and sell it for a bit less money". consequently you have the STM32F030 which is identical in every respect to the STM32F070 except that the STM32F030 doesn't have a USB interface.
... you see how that works?
![Smiley :)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/xsmiley.gif.pagespeed.ic.R8GFI-pF6f.png)
so, the product at the end of the day is intended to be sold in mass-volume markets... oh and it happens to be fully libre and 100% transparent right to the bedrock. you'll be familiar with the commercial benefits of full source code availability, due to the cost savings.