[mozumder]

This is a huge topic. You can spend your entire career in just each part of your question - fabrication in a foundry, FPGA synthesis, HDL design, ASIC place and route, etc..

I've actually done all-of-the-above, from making SOI wafers to analog circuit design for CMOS image sensors to satellite network simulation in FPGAs to supercomputer architecture and design to XBox GPU place-and-route.

It will honestly take you at least a few years to be able to understand all of this, and I can't even begin to tell you where to begin.

My track started with semiconductor fabrication processing in college - lots of chemistry, lithography, physics, design-of-experiments, etc.. I guess that's as good a start as any. But before that I did get into computer architecture in high-school, so that game me some reference goals.

What are you ultimately trying to do? Get a job at a fab? That's a lot of chemistry and science. Do you want to design state-of-the-art chips, as your IP-core question hints at? That's largely an EE degree. Do you want to build a cheap kickstarter product, as your FPGA question suggest? That's EE and Computer Engineering as well.