A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than I’ll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanity’s finest technical achievements.
VLSI and processor design are, like most things in computing, things that you can learn if you have basic logical thinking skills and spend the requisite time.
Mead and Conway's textbook unlocked VLSI design for generations of students. Now you can find videos on youtube, and you can even join tiny tapeout to get your chip design fabricated. And for processor design, you can design something in Verilog or VHDL and run it on an FPGA board.
I also recently discovered Digital, a gate/component-level design tool and simulator for digital circuits (which can also export to Verilog for synthesis), that is similar to the older Logisim.
