The increase in transistor density has caused a similar increase in engineering staff. There are now many hundreds of architects and design engineers working at numerous Intel sites all over the world on next-generation processor implementations. The project management challenges to keep such a large team focused and productive requires a sophisticated computer network with advanced workstations and development tools. And so the cycle continues. Intel has approximately the same number of engineers testing and validating its processor designs as those architecting and designing.
Additional circuitry is added to the processor core to ease the debug and validation process.
Test coverage models are generated so that each and every logical function can be thoroughly tested. Additionally, legacy software tests are run on the computer model to ensure software compatibility with previous processor generations. As the geometries of a transistor get smaller, the propagation delays through the device also get smaller. Unfortunately, as the metalized interconnects get smaller, their resistance and capacitance increases and therefore the propagation delay through them increases. Intel has multiple approaches to this challenge the most obvious being to use a metal with a higher conductivity than the aluminum currently used in production.