It would be nice if low volume foundry costs went down an order of magnitude. I'm in a bio lab right now, but I did CS in college and really enjoyed VLSI. If I want to turn a design into a prototype in my bio lab, it's going to cost hundreds of dollars, but if I want to turn a chip I designed into reality, it's going to cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars even with specialized low volume foundries like MOSIS. I feel like it should be cheaper.
Generally speaking, that's where FPGAs excel. You get a good chunk of the speedup that comes with designing your own circuit at a lower cost than actual ASICs (at least for protoyping and low volume batches).
