Unless any other tech expert comes with a better proposal, let's analyze the Altera Hardcopy path with some depth.
I welcome any other input. This is a multidisciplinary effort, and could definitely benefit from others individuals with experience in hardware design, HDL programming, ASIC design, to say nothing of the business acumen needed to make it all happen.
"Produce PC board with predecessor FPGA on it. Develop/test mining software on it to prove design".
Can this step be ellaborated, and estimate material costs and man hours ?
Certainly. I will look into this further in the next day, but right off the top of my head it seems to me that phase I could be considerably shortened by putting off the design of a completed board for the ASIC until later, and using an existing development board with the FPGA predecessor to the Altera Hardcopy device. The appropriate prototype FPGAs for the HC4E35FF1152 Hardcopy device would be one of the EP4SE230, EP4SE360, EP4SE530, or EP4SE820. The last device would be preferable because although it costs more, it has 820K LEs on it. This is still considerably less than the Hardcopy IV device, but it is at least large enough that issues surrounding the operation of multiple miners in parallel could be tested and debugged ahead of the final design. I'm sure there are several companies that make the necessary boards, but a quick search turned up this one --
http://www.polaris-ds.com/products/boards/tile-board/ -- as one possible candidate. It looks like I will need to contact sales for a quote, but I doubt it would cost more than $10K, and probably considerably less.
Beyond acquisition of the board, a suitable development machine (with a reasonably fast processor and LOTS of memory) would be needed, and probably the Quartus II software would need to be licensed for it as well. All of this hardware could be located at a central place with good internet connectivity. This would allow multiple people to be involved with the development while limiting the initial cost outlay.
With regards to the software, we would benefit in time tremendously from not re-inventing the wheel here. Fpgaminer has released his code under the GPL, so I believe we are free to start with it as the basis for the design (and this includes Makomk's enhancements to the code). Some further tuning can be made to the code, but the main thrust of the development should be the development of an architecture which will interface gracefully to an existing mining front end like cgminer. I suspect that would meet with more approval from the community than developing an entirely separate software front end as others have done, and it certainly should cut back on our development time as well.
Actual time estimates are tricky, so please take these with a grain of salt. Doing a more accurate estimate would require breaking down the development into smaller pieces, and that is something that should be discussed with all of the developers at once (I'm assuming that I would not be the only developer on the project). I estimate about 2-3 weeks (depending on the exact feature set decided upon) to modify existing HDL code to enable multiple miners to run in parallel and to operate efficiently over a common communication bus for accepting work packages and delivering results. I estimate a further 1-2 man weeks of development time to construct an interface (USB, etc.) to interface the miners on the FPGA/ASIC to the mining front-end software (such as cgminer). Hiring expert consultants to perform the above HDL development could reduce the time estimates by as much as a factor of two, although with significant added cost.
A more ambitious approach may include the ability to run the system as a standalone miner. An ARM processor or a soft-processor running Linux could be used, and from there it would not be too big of a jump to adapt existing mining software to run directly on the system. This would increase development time and risk, and may be something best considered as a later add-on (easily doable by making the original design modular).
On the legal side, I will register company in Hong Kong (any other jurisdiction proposal ?).
This is $1200-1500 cost, and I can fund this until 1st round of funding is made.
I think HK is an excellent jurisdiction for such a company due to very advantageous taxation rates compared to other countries as well as the strong rule of law and easy access to China for cheap manufacturing.
By the way, when it comes to the Hardcopy side of things, I came across the following link on the Altera site:
http://www.altera.com/devices/asic/hardcopy-asics/about/hrd-development-methodology.html This is comforting as it shows that relatively small amounts of time are needed to go from a completed Hardcopy design to samples (albeit large amounts of money are required).