Synopsys, Siemens, and Cadence's EDA tools are the reason for the most part.

They have automated a lot of the really hard work and most the industry is trained on their tools.

I think you can get pretty far when it comes to hardware design.

I mean you can download and use verilator, openroad, yosys, ngspice, bsim-cmg, klayout and all this fun stuff.

The big blocker is really pdks. Where are you gonna get something that actually fabs? ASAP7 is just predictive.

And foundries are incredibly geopolitically important so they aint revealing anything.