“If management had known that we were using a tool by some grad student as a key part of the methodology, they would never have let us use it.”
The Pentium packs 3.3 million transistors, and much of its logic was never laid out by hand. Intel moved to automatic place and route with the 386 because manual layout was slow and error-prone. The placement tool was Timberwolf, written by a Berkeley grad student. The chip that made Intel’s name runs partly on software management never signed off on.