It would likely just be better to create a multi-channel software vocoder for D-Star, this chip business is silly.
A lot of folks use the MD380 emulator (which is the handy work of Travis, KK4VCZ's md380 reverse engineering project) to get around the hardware requirements of most systems that with otherwise require with dongles or boards.
Its also the preference for a virtual environment where you don't have physical access to the servers. Russell, KV4S did a good job documenting this with his blog entry titled "Hosting an AllStar Node and an AllStarDMR bridge in the cloud"
Sadly that emulator doesn't support D-Star even though that is the mode completely out of patent.
If someone is up to coding a solution for D-Star, these projects might be good to look at as some of the basics are in these projects:
