I mean 3B is a large number ,how to design and even count them?
Well…I am really like I am five.
In: Engineering
Well in short the answer is they spend a -lot- of money.
The idea becomes more reasonable when you consider that the set of masks to make a modern chip can run into hundreds of millions of dollars to make. Though for chips that don’t need so many transistors in one spot, or aren’t as complex might be more like a few million or even a couple hundred thousand for the low end. The machines that actually use those masks to make a chip cost just as much.
In more detail no one is designing these chips by hand. The general architecture is sure, but there are computer algorithms actually generating the low level design.
As for how they do it its still a variant of photolithography. Basically they take some chemical that hardens when exposed to light, shine light through a patterned mask with holes in it for the design, wash away anything that isn’t hardened, do some chemical treatments then repeat.
There are massive technical issues when you get that small mind you. Mask repair gets done with electron microscopes and ion beams that those individual atoms at gaps to fill them in. We’ve run into issues with the type of light used as well. The latest EUV machines do this absurd thing where they fling a micro sized drop of molten metal into the air, blast it with a laser to turn it into metal gas, then blast the gas with another laser to make a high intensity UV flash.
But again. There’s huge amounts of money spent on developing these machines years before they are even expected to be needed.
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