> Hardware is hard because it's manufacturing. You can't "iterate quickly", every iteration costs millions of dollars and so does every mistake.

This is true for injection molding and yet we do that all the time in small businesses.

A mask set for an older technology can be in the range of $50K-$100K. That's right about the same price as injection molds.

The main difference is that Solidworks is about $25K while Cadence, et al, is about a megabuck.