there are two types of businness
a) we make it all
b) we buy what others do better

Jez comes through as a type a) person, my company, however, is more like ab.

Were we to need a FPGA design I would seriously consider 'farming it out'.

As an example, we do have in house layout capabilities, but occsaionally, for reasons of limited resources, we farm a biggie out.

The risk in your proposal is that you will get flooded with requests from people that only want "Then you get .. a bit stream that implements the part in a FPGA" for free, I would, instead send them a couple of samples of read protected devices. Then, on the other hand, some may only want "a couple of samples" how many have posted here "I use Dallas, because I could get my uCs for free" (2))

The service you propose can very well be succesful, but you need protect against the above or you will, as so many staring entrepeneurs, end up working your butt off for free.

The above is not my nature, do not worry, but I could see myself thinking "I would like to experiment with a '51 that had DMA for some I/O, to see what coding efficiencies I could squeeze out of such a device that would not need ISRs."

Erik