Recently I studied the very fundamentals of how computers work at the level of 1s and 0s, wires, and logic gates from a book written for laypersons. I followed the book along and built a very, very primitive computer with a cpu and ram in a simulator by plotting different kinds of logic gates and connecting them with wires.
After this exercise I’m left wondering how are new chips designed nowadays considering that there are billions and billions of microscopic transistors in a modern chip? I’m assuming there are some levels of abstraction to simplify the process? I can’t imagine all those billions of transistors and wires being plotted manually one by one by people. Is there like a programming language of some sort where a compiler converts syntax into circuitry layouts?
Also, I don’t mean the physical manufacturing process. I think I have a good grasp of that. I’m purely talking about the design stage.
They don’t really need to be cause it’s a repeating pattern.
Doesn’t matter what the pattern is, but think of it like a checkerboard.
If you were making one, you’d take the time to just draw it yourself. This would be designing a chip.
If you decided to cover a football field in checkerboard pattern, you’d take you’re existing checkerboard, and just “stamp” that over and over again. Maybe even strap a dozen checkerboards together and then stamp that. This would be scaling your initial chip design for producture.
Once the entire design is done, you make some prototypes, test them, and fix fail points.
When you go in wide scale production, some have too many errors, so you blank out even more and sell it for cheaper. Although that’s out of scope it’s good to highlight that there are acceptable fail rates for design. If they went only for 100% success nothing would ever make it to production