Dear lowRISC team We are a brand-new startup based in Shenzhen. Our goal is to produce free and open source hardware. Since we all share the enthusiasm for open source products, we were enlightened to learn about your project. We are very interested in a collaboration with our organization. For example, we could take over the production of your first chip. Right now, we are looking for an inexpensive chip manufacturer here in Shenzhen. Because we have access to the local manufacturing lines here in main land China (thanks to the relations of friends who happen to be locals), we can beat down the prices for the production of a prototype series enormously. And we are confident that we can produce 100-200k chips for around 5$ each. It's also possible for us to produce smaller amounts of chips because we can share mask space with other engineers here. So we could help you save money as well. This would be interesting for you I guess, since it's a waste of time and material (silicon) to produce 100k chips only to find out that you had an unspotted hazard in your transistor layout somewhere. With only a dozens of the chips it hurts less :-) If you are interested into a cooperation with our start-up it would be very helpfull for finding a suitable manufacturer if I knew whether you've already finished the litographic masks and if yes, in which format and with which tool (e.g. qflow?) Otherwise I could assist you with this as well. We are looking forward to hearing from you 智宇 (Cedric), David and Cristoffel http://lanceville.cn/zh/ (under construction)