[smaddox]

To clarify what the parent is getting at: Moore's law is an observation about the density (and, really about the cost) of transistors. So it's about the fabrication process, not about the logic design.

Practically speaking, though, maintaining Moore's law would have been economically prohibitive if circuit design and layout had not been automated.

[bgnn]

That's true. The impact on design is reverse of the post I replied to though. Since we got more density, we had more compute available to automate more, which made it economically viable. Every generation had enough compute to design the next generation. Now the device scaling is stagnated, we have more (financially viable) compute available to us than before (compared to design complexity). This is why this AI generated floorplans become viable I think. I'm not sure if it would have been the same should the device scaling would be continuing at its peak.

I want to emphasize the biggest barrier for IC design to the outsiders: prohibitively expensive software licenses. IC design software costs are the much higher than conpute and the production costs, and often similar order of magnitude but definitely higher than engineer salaries. This is because of the monopoly of the 3 big companies (Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics). What wxcites me the most about stuff like OP isn't AI, everyone is doing that. It's the premise of more competition and even open source tool options. In the good old days companies used to have their im-house tools. They are all sacrificed (and pretty much none made open source) because investors thought it's not a core business, so it's inefficient. Now even Nvidia or Apple have no alternative.