I think it's a great initiative. However, marrying it to Caravel means that it basically a prototype and far away from a standalone product.

Would be great to see a path to a real OSHW ASIC. That would require either a substantially larger crowd funding initiative or somehow setting up an ecosystem with fixed die and package options for OSHW IC products.

I don't think the costs would be as high as everyone thinks, but the effort and time investment would be significant.