Somdeb Majumdar

Chip design has come a long way since 1971, when Federico Faggin finished sketching the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, using little more than a straightedge and colored pencils. Today’s designers have a plethora of software tools at their disposal to plan and test new integrated circuits. But as chips have grown staggeringly complex—with some comprising hundreds of billions of transistors—so have the problems designers must solve. And those tools aren’t always up to