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

Because they’re not designed transistor by transistor. In much the same way that software is written using programming languages, not 1s and 0s, logic circuits can be designed using a [hardware description language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language) to describe the logic at a high level, which can then be “compiled” into an actual circuit diagram using software.

Also, a CPU or graphics card is made up of many different sub-units, which are themselves made up of different components. For example, in an SRAM memory circuit, you’ll have a particular circuit to store 1 bit, which is then repeated millions of times to be able to store megabytes of data. That’s a lot of transistors, but most of it is just copies of the same circuit (there’s also addressing logic to allow data to be read/written, of course).