[f00zz]

> this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself

It isn't! The book "Code" by Charles Petzold is a great introduction to digital electronics and computer architecture. There's also the "Nand to Tetris" course (which I didn't take but people here are always recommending). You can build a simple CPU in a digital circuit simulator. If you're feeling adventurous you can write it in Verilog and simulate it, and even get it to run on a FPGA. This is all stuff you can teach yourself.

Of course this is not quite enough to make you a chip designer at AMD, but you'll know enough to get over the feeling that a microprocessor is an inscrutable artifact of alien technology brought from Alpha Centauri.

[wrycoder]

Nand2tetris, which is far more sophisticated than Code, would be a good background (highly recommended), but it has almost nothing to do with the technology actually used in a wafer fab.

The relevant disciplines are physics (mostly condensed matter), inorganic chemistry, industrial engineering, and electronics.

Find a school that teaches semiconductor engineering, take their courses through vlsi and ASICs.

Then land a job at a fab and the rest is learn on the job training.

It’s like the difference between a PC board fab and an electronics design engineer, taken to the google power.