Nvidia CEO said they spent $10 Billon dollars on R&D for their new chip. What exactly does an R&D worker do all day? Where does this money go?

Question

How does a chip go from being an academic theory to a $10 billion R&D Project?

In: Technology

Answer 1

The software alone that is used to design/verify chips cost millions of dollars. I used to work for an EDA company and the software used to verify a chip design would cost customers around 250k to $1 million per license. To scale up the software and be able to run on 100s of CPU you would need 10s to 100s of licenses.