~10yr of synthetic bio, did 4yr of mitochondrial engineering + directed evolution at UCI, then ran the FreeGenes Project for 3yr at Stanford.

Chisel for programming it (great little lang/project) https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Chisel-Martin-Schoeber...

Efabless PDKs - https://efabless.com/

Other than that, lots of trial and error. Hardware people are brutal with their acronyms, so it really comes down to a lot of stumbling around and reading whatever I can.