David Rowe makes a point about echo cancellers and voice codecs, which he's written in Open Source, working alone. They were supposed to be magic. They were supposed to take big expensive research labs to make. When he actually got down to the work, he found there wasn't really magic there. Codec2 can get clear speech into 1200 Baud, and OSLEC (the echo canceler) is part of every Asterisk system and other digital telephony platforms.
Steve Jobs also told me this when I was leaving Pixar. He didn't believe that the Linux guys could make a decent window system, because it had taken a Billion dollar research lab at Apple. Two years later he unveiled Safari, which was derivative of KDE.
There is no question that we can make a good gate array. The technology is very well known. Can we make one that is on the absolute leading edge of the technology? We don't really have to. Making a good one that was open would be enough. But maybe we can make a great one. That depends upon what makes it great. We have a collaborative advantage as far as the software tools are concerned, the same as with compilers. Can we design a really good logic element and fabric? Probably. Can we prototype a gate-array in a gate-array? Sure! Can we use the various devices that OpenCores has developed? I don't think there would be a problem. So we could have on-chip peripherals, CPUs, etc. Once we're sure of it, can it be well-tuned to a fab? Probably, but even if we are conservative about using the fab's capabilities it would work.