It's not often you see stories like this. A single engineer-entrepreneur architected, designed, and built a System-on-Chip (SoC) single handedly to perform floating point operation using 50 to 100 times less power than available today. It's a fascinating story in EE Times blogabout Andreas Olofsson of Adapteva who took 3 month to convert his architecture to VHDL using the open source Verlator Verilog-to-c translator to verify the 10k lines of VHDL code for the design. He then taped out in 6 weeks and used a shuttle at semiconductor fab for his first prototype. He did this using his personal savings and money from friends and family. He met a customer that ended up funding his company with $1.5 M to go into production. Now that's one lean startup and supportive family.