[mjn]

all the optimizations (synthesis, place-and-route) are NP-hard problems

I suspect this one in particular could be chipped away at pretty successfully if the tooling were less closed. When you get some open benchmarks and let both researchers and systems-builders hack away at it, you can get very good practical solutions to NP-hard problems, as the current crop of SAT-solvers, SMT engines, and TSP-routing tools attest.

[amirhirsch]

I wrote an post 5 years ago about how an electronic-design-automation-as-a-service company could sell access to a huge supercomputer for solving these problems faster: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/megahard-corp-open...

most researchers make up their own architectures to demonstrate place-and-route algorithms, for example there is this challenge to improve p&r: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~vaughn/challenge/challenge.html