How are scientists able design processors with such large amounts of transistors? Do they do it with automation? How is it possible to do something like this at that scale?
In: Physics
They started small and worked their way up. The first integrated circuits (chips) had only a few transistors on them, but they quickly got better at design and manufacturing multiple transistors on a single chip, to the point where many microchips have billions of transistors.
Early microchips were designed by hand. This was done from the earliest experiements in the 1950s until the late 1970s, by which point there were thousands or even tens of thousands on transistors on a chip. The blueprints for the chip became so huge that the designers printed them out the size of a tennis court, then crawled around on them with pens and pencils to make changes.
Around this time, the first automated chip layout software became available. This software allowed a computer to do a lot of the detail work of routing individual wire traces, while the human designer made higher level decisions. This software has gotten better and better over time. In large part, the capability of the automated design software has dictated how complex chips can be, as the software got better, the chips got bigger.
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