ElI5 how microchips have millions of transistors without placing them individually

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ElI5 how microchips have millions of transistors without placing them individually

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Early in the development of computer chips they would have been designed by hand, actually drawing the location of individual components. However fairly quickly it became possible to design chips with the help of computers, and eventually *necessary* to do so. Modern CPUs can have 26 billion transistors and there is no way humans are manually deciding on their location and integration with the rest of the chip.

Instead specialized computer programs are used to design new chips to a particular specification. The particulars of these software packages are trade secrets as obviously Intel wouldn’t want just anyone being able to design new chips exactly as they can.

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