When I was in the valley I talked to a couple of people to understand the state of the venture capital world we’re living in today. It seems not many hardware related start-ups are being funded any more currently. Most of the money goes to Web 2.0 related start-ups or environ-tech companies. This is a little disturbing to me, as I was hoping for a plentiful job market for hardware design engineers after the crash in 2009. But it appears that the cost for putting a business together around hardware is just to steep.
These days you need somewhere in the vicinity of $50Mio to just get anything hardware related going. EDA software licenses, mask making and debug equipment is just so prohibitively expensive, that testing out ideas has become almost impractical. This is left to the big players, the Intels, IBMs and Samsungs of the world. Unfortunately these behemoths of corporations have a very different
risk attitude towards new ventures and are usually much more interested in iterating existing and proven products over and over again. Innovation in the US seems to have slowed significantly with many developments being done now abroad by hungry young companies in Asia, or the Middle East.