Most of the money would be in development, not research. Elegant designs and methods exist, and the designs can be iterated very quickly. The very real proble

Most of the money would be in development, not research. Elegant designs and methods exist, and the designs can be iterated very quickly. The very real problem has been interfacing with the rest of the world. Not at the hardware level (see the switch designs mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but in the interoperability of design software and other tools. Any company will need either their own design software, or to do a massive hack-job to get synchronous design software to work well without that bedrock assumption.