Ternary Computing Revisited

Black Acid writes: "American Scientist's Third Base was a nice introduction to the advantages base 3 but didn't really explain ternary computing. Since 1995, Steve Grubb has maintained trinary.cc which covers many aspects of computing with base 3. Not only are the basic unary and binary gates enumerated, which I independently verified as being basic building blocks, but real-world circuits are described also. Half and full adders, multiplexers and demultiplexers, counters, shift registers, and even the legendary flip-flap-flop are all covered with ternary algebra equations and schematics. Steve Grubb touches on problems of of interfacing to binary computers elegantly, although no schematics are given. Perhaps most impressive are the Transistor Models - schematics of the basic gates which can be built from cheap parts available at your local electronic component store."

Comments

Show me a trinary Schottky

[rdmiller3]

The big disadvantage of using any logic system with more than two states, electrically, is that sometimes in switching from one state to another you must go through a third state which is electrically "valid" but not the correct output for the function you're implementing.

Electrically, implementation is inevitably binary, at its core... electrical comparisons of boundary conditions. "Trinary" is just a minimal case of "analog", with all of the same disadvantages.

You want the same noise margins? You'll have to double your voltage. That means you're cutting your speed in half. So overall you're taking a loss because at half speed you could have gotten two whole bits for your money instead of one lousey trit.

Not to mention the fact that you're using more power, switching between these trinary states due to the longer transition and detection times. Oh boy! Hotter chips! Bleah!