Chip Design

Before a single atom is etched into silicon, a chip has to be designed — a process that turns an idea (“we need a processor that does X”) into a mind-bogglingly precise map of billions of transistors and wires. This section follows that journey: how engineers describe a chip’s behavior in code, how software turns that code into physical geometry, why the industry has managed to double transistor counts for decades, and what those famous “7nm” and “5nm” node names actually mean today.