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

To design a CPU, the designers determines the higher level design, meaning the registers, memory, arithmetic unit, and other parts, and how they should be connected. This design is then coded in some hardware description language like VHDL and similar to how a compiler takes code and turns it in to a program, the VHDL environment takes the VHDL and generates a netlist and creates the lower level circuit design.