If there are billions of transistors in a CPU, there is no chance that somebody designed every single one of them manually. Is their layout calculated or something?
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I’m a little old and others basically covered the subject, so I’ll just add a few interesting bits. When we were learning the IC design, one of the steps was to actually design the small functioning chip by hand using PADS. You was supposed to implement some technology rules and design every single layer (n areas, p areas, metals, polysilicon etc) manually. We started with single transistors, then gates and finished with somewhat crazy ICs. We were designing operational amplifiers as well and believe me – designing one by hand looks simple but when you simulate it – all hell breaks loose. You have to understand placement, crosstalk, interference etc etc. We even had to write simplified circuit simulators. But the best reward was that if we designed those chips properly – they were sent to the fab and we received our physical versions of chips.
You can have all those fancy software to compile hardware into silicone, but that software still needs a technology rules and base designs in it’s library to work with. And that’s how we were learning how to make those. Following year we were designing simple things like VGA cards or more complicated things like simple processors.
So yes – you have the software that will help you to design and place stuff, but you have to know how it works and technological rules to make it work.
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