Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

A list of fabs can be seen at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants and basically summarizes all the companies that have fabs.

Register transfer level is the abstraction level at which computer chips are mostly designed.

The only two truly relevant RTL languages as of 2020 are: Verilog and VHDL. Everything else compiles to those, because that's all that EDA vendors support.

Much like a C compiler abstracts away the CPU assembly to:

Compilers for RTL languages such as Verilog and VHDL abstract away the details of the specific semiconductor technology used for those exact same reasons.

The compilers essentially compile the RTL languages into a standard cell library.

Examples of companies that work at this level include:

Basically what register transfer level compiles to in order to achieve a real chip implementation.

After this is done, the final step is place and route.

They can be designed by third parties besides the semiconductor fabrication plants. E.g. Arm Ltd. markets its Artisan Standard Cell Libraries as mentioned e.g. at: web.archive.org/web/20211007050341/https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/physical-ip/logic This came from a 2004 acquisition: www.eetimes.com/arm-to-acquire-artisan-components-for-913-million/, obviously.

The standard cell library is typically composed of a bunch of versions of somewhat simple gates, e.g.:and so on.

Each of those gates has to be designed by hand as a 3D structure that can be produced in a given fab.

Simulations are then carried out, and the electric properties of those structures are characterized in a standard way as a bunch of tables of numbers that specify things like:Those are then used in power, performance and area estimates.