What You'll Learn
Eight topics, in the order the industry actually uses them — from a chip's first logic gate to the methodology that proves it works.
Digital Design
Combinational and sequential logic — the foundation of every chip.
02Verilog
The hardware description language used to model digital circuits.
03SystemVerilog
Verilog's superset for design and verification, IEEE 1800.
04Testbench
Environments that stimulate and check a design under test.
05UVM
The industry-standard methodology for reusable, scalable verification.
06Logic Synthesis
Turning RTL into a real gate-level netlist, constrained by timing, area, and power.
07Verification
Proving a design does what it's supposed to, before silicon.
08UPF
Unified Power Format for describing and verifying low-power intent.
The Silicon Timeline
From a single transistor to trillion-dollar AI infrastructure — the moments that shaped the chips everything else is built on.
- 1947
The First Transistor
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley demonstrate the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs, replacing bulky, power-hungry vacuum tubes and kicking off the solid-state era.
- 1958
The Integrated Circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments builds the first working integrated circuit, proving that multiple components could live on a single piece of semiconductor.
- 1965
Moore's Law
Gordon Moore observes that transistor density roughly doubles every two years — a prediction that sets the industry's pace for the next half-century.
- 1968
Intel Is Founded
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore leave Fairchild Semiconductor to start Intel, betting on silicon memory and logic as the future of computing.
- 1971
The First Microprocessor
Intel ships the 4004, packing an entire CPU onto a single chip for the first time and laying the groundwork for personal computing.
- 1987
TSMC & the Foundry Model
Morris Chang founds TSMC as a pure-play foundry, splitting chip design from manufacturing and enabling the fabless industry as we know it today.
- 1990
ARM Is Born
ARM spins out to license low-power processor designs instead of manufacturing chips — an architecture that now powers nearly every smartphone on Earth.
- 2006
GPUs Go General-Purpose
NVIDIA launches CUDA, turning graphics chips into parallel computing engines and quietly setting up the hardware for the AI boom to come.
- 2011
Transistors Go 3D
Intel ships the first FinFET ("tri-gate") transistors, bending silicon into the third dimension to keep Moore's Law alive as planar scaling ran out of room.
- 2020
The Global Chip Shortage
COVID-19 disruption exposes how fragile — and how important — global semiconductor supply chains really are, from cars to game consoles.
- 2022
The CHIPS Act
The US commits over $52 billion to rebuild domestic chip manufacturing, as nations race to secure their own advanced semiconductor supply.
- 2023–Now
The AI Chip Boom
Explosive demand for AI accelerators pushes the industry toward its first trillion-dollar year, reshaping chip design around compute density and power efficiency.
The Chip Industry, By The Numbers
Semiconductors quietly became one of the largest, most concentrated, and most strategically important industries on Earth.
Figures are approximate 2026 industry estimates (SIA, Gartner, Deloitte, WSTS) and shift quickly amid the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout.
Think You Know the Curriculum?
Quiz yourself section by section, topic by topic, or across the entire curriculum at once.
Ready to Go From Gates to Silicon?
Start with the fundamentals and work your way up to the methodology real chip teams use to verify hardware before it's too late — and too expensive — to fix.
Start Learning