I mean 3B is a large number ,how to design and even count them?
Well…I am really like I am five.
In: Engineering
Most of the transistors in modern ics are used towards memory elements (SRAMS, caches etc.). That’s where a large chunk of the transistor count comes from, the number of transistors used in implementing things that do “active work” is usually much less.
It doesn’t make it any less impressive though 🙂
Another comment has also touched on the idea that a lot of it is broken up into macros. For example one memory element can be a large macro, and many macros can combine to give high memory counts – which as you can imagine can quickly lead to very large transistor counts.
This simplifies the work for engineers considerably, as placing billions of transistors and checking them all one by one isn’t really feasible.
As for how is this all possible? Very impressive computer tools that automate a lot of work. Virtually nothing is done by hand or manually, it’s just not possible at that level of complexity.
Source: I do chip design for a living.
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