I'm interested in hardware startups but at a higher level than chip design. Some semi-random pointers which might be of interest: * OGP is an open source hard

I'm interested in hardware startups but at a higher level than chip design. Some semi-random pointers which might be of interest: * OGP is an open source hardware project to create open source video graphics hardware which currently uses a FPGA: http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php * Bunnie is one of the people behind the Chumby and has documented his manufacturing experiences on his blog but that seems to be at a higher level than what you're looking for: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/ http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/ * ARM is an example of something that started out with a small development team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture For prototyping purposes my limited understanding is that software simulation and FPGAs can be used initially. If you're interested in FPGAs this site of open source FPGA code might be of interest: http://opencores.org/ http://opencores.org/