ELI5, if it takes nearly thirty years to count to a billion, one second at a time, how are humans able design complex CPUs and Graphics cards containing multiple billions of transistors?

Question

ELI5, if it takes nearly thirty years to count to a billion, one second at a time, how are humans able design complex CPUs and Graphics cards containing multiple billions of transistors?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

You’ve gotten multiple correct responses, but not all in one place. There’s not a single answer, there are several:

Cut and paste.
Multiple teams of people.
Using software tools to do much of the work.
Reuse of previous designs.