How does one go about learning IC design to begin with? I only have the vaguest notion of what all these terms mean to begin with. Is it analogous to teaching yourself to code, or is it fundamentally different/harder?
It’s very different if you do it right but not really harder. The first thing you learn is digital logic design at an abstract level. Something like this: https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~pjcheng/course/asm2008/asm_ch2_...
Then once you can make digital designs you learn to describe them in a hardware description language (HDL) such as Verilog.
When reviewing verilog designs it’s very easy to spot the “verilog coders” vs the hardware designers.
No, it is not harder. But in hardware, everything mostly runs in parallel. So if you have learned how to write multithreaded programs, then you basically know the level of difficulty of designing ICs.
