This collection of sites pays homage to out of the way uses of this magical stuff. If you've ever been faced with a mysterious IC, and you need to know what it does, then Hitex Development Tools has what you need. It has a massive chip directory, where you can search by part number or manfacturer. The directory lists the product number, name, general functional category, brief description and manafacturer. It also provides simple links to check other chip directory sites.
Visitors can also contribute new chip decscriptions to the directory.
Getting to the core of the matter Opencores.org hopes to do for hardware what the open source movement did for software. It promotes the sharing of chip designs - usually jealously guarded trade secrets. The project is still just getting up speed, so this would be a great time to get involved. Most of the chip cores present are still under development, but some are currently available for download now. Sources are published in VHDL or Verilog.