So by the time you’ve finished that lab you'll know how to design an integrated circuit, and how to simulate it to test that it works as you want it to work. After that, we send your designs off to have them fabricated, to have them made in a cleanroom. A few months later, you turn up to find a piece of silicon so you can test your chip using the software tools and the simulation environment. Getting back a real piece of silicon means that you can see if your chip actually works in practice.