Whenever I watch videos on the insanely complex creation of microchips they also talk about how they are replicated to mass produce them, but skip over how the initial design is made. How is something so miniscule and complex designed or planned out?
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People used to place and route transistors on the chips by manually drawing them.
This worked OK when circuits were simple and only a relatively few transistors were required.
Modern CPUs can have billions of transistors. Manual creation is no longer possible if you want a chip to be designed and fabricated within a human lifetime–even if you had a huge skilled labor force.
Now days, there is a type of “programming language” called a hardware description language. With these you describe how you want your hardware to work (logic functions, memory, etc) and the synthesizer (“compiler”) generates the required hardware design to build it.
Instead of building each similar function you want everytime you can create objects to do specific things. These objects can in turn be created by simpler objects nested inside of it. For example you may want an ALU which does simple mathematic functions. It may require adders, multipliers, memory, etc–each of these could be separate objects you combine to produce a working ALU. You may then also use the adder object to increment a program counter object for example.
Designing a new chip then becomes a process of putting these objects together and defining the glue logic to connect them. We’re glossing over a lot of testing, fabricating, etc. You won’t be creating a new chip without a few million dollars to burn.
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