Step of electronic design automation that maps the register transfer level input (e.g. Verilog) to a standard cell library.

The output of this step is another Verilog file, but one that exclusively uses interlinked cell library components.

Bibliography:

Given a bunch of interlinked standard cell library elements from the logic synthesis step, actually decide where exactly they are going to go on 2D (stacked 2D) integrated circuit surface.

Sample output format of place and route would be GDSII.

The main ones as of 2020 are:

This paper is in the public domain and people have uploaded it e.g. to glorious Wikisource: en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Relative_Motion_of_the_Earth_and_the_Luminiferous_Ether including its amazing illustrations.

Very good channel to learn some basics of semiconductor device fabrication!

Focuses mostly on the semiconductor industry.

youtu.be/aL_kzMlqgt4?t=661 from Video "SMIC, Explained by Asianometry (2021)" from mentions he is of Chinese ascent, ancestors from Ningbo. Earlier in the same video he mentions he worked on some startups. He doesn't appear to speak perfect Mandarin Chinese anymore though based on pronounciation of Chinese names.

asianometry.substack.com/ gives an abbreviated name "Jon Y".

It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.

The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.