3 ms·

I can’t fathom how there are humans who can understand this stuff. I “just” do software and microcontrollers

• PaulHoule 3y ago
  Chips at that level are often pretty simple. For fun I something build out circuits with 74xx or 54xx that are about this complex on a breadboard and drive them with an Arduino.
• wmf 3y ago
  To give some perspective, a chip like this from 1982 would have been designed by a very small team; maybe just 2-3 people and they were using primitive 1970s technology with no Internet access. Today you could learn how to design a chip like this in a few years, maybe faster if you just stick to logic design.
  • voxadam 3y ago
    > using primitive 1970s technology Including, but not limited to, miles of Rubylith.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubylith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubylith
    • kens 3y ago
      Well, square feet of Rubylith maybe. I haven't been able to find the exact date that Intel switched from Rubylith to digitally-generated masks, but I'm pretty sure they had switched by 1982.
• tails4e 3y ago
  I work in ASIC design, and while it seems like gobbledygook, it's not too hard to grok with some experience. Ken's blogs help a lot in that regard. For context, compared to modern chips these are extremely simple, bit at the time the tools for chip design were limited so it was a bit of art and science in one. Now there is a lot of automation to help 'draw' the layout using standard cells for digital, but analog design is still an art (and incredibly complex one). So at least for digital weve first order abstracted designers from the individual gates and wires, and design is more akin to programming, though in languages designed for hardware. I feel fortunate enough to have seen both sides, so have done both the full custom design as well as the highly EDA driven design.