They are more than willing to hand out old designs to university groups (you just have to ask nicely). In fact someone in our group spend his PhD developing a c

They are more than willing to hand out old designs to university groups (you just have to ask nicely). In fact someone in our group spend his PhD developing a custom embedded Power processor in 65nm just to be told that when he was hired by IBM (whether he would have gotten the job is a different question of course).