What changes will three state transistors bring to computing??

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Braznor

Braznor

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Oct 9, 2005
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If three state transistors can be utilized in modern computing, what changes can we expect to our computing experience?

Instead of the normal two state transistors we have now, what can three state transistors will introduce to computing in terms of processing power and memory technologies?

More importantly, what will this mean for A.I. in terms of computing?
 
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Ruptga

Ruptga

Lifer
Aug 3, 2006
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Undergrads will have to learn to count in trinary. A few niche applications will see a benefit, but reliability and scalability will take a few generations to be good enough for real use on the market.
 
Braznor

Braznor

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Oct 9, 2005
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Ruptga said:
Undergrads will have to learn to count in trinary. A few niche applications will see a benefit, but reliability and scalability will take a few generations to be good enough for real use on the market.
Click to expand...

Do you think Artificial Intelligence technology will take a boost in terms of this development? More than processing power, I think A.I will benefit most from this.

Added this to the OP
 
M

Matthiasa

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May 4, 2009
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Honestly the experience would not change at all, for AI it means nothing. Programming languages already abstract away the hardware beneath for all but the lowest level ones.
At the hardware level things may change but that is all.
 
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Ruptga

Ruptga

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Aug 3, 2006
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Ternary computing has been an option for a long time, it's just not used because it sucks. The gates are leaky and hard to make (and leaky because they're hard to make), so so they have to be run slower and built on a larger fabrication process than is available for binary transistors. In theory ternary could be great for data processing and storage, but in practice it's just not worth it.

Quantum computing is the next big thing, because it allows for the solution of some otherwise unsolvable problems, similar to how an FPU lets you do things that an integer-only processor can't do. Likewise, quantum computing has its drawbacks and it's not likely to replace computers as we know them, but it will add to them.

The issue of AI isn't about hardware, really, it's about software. Better hardware is always better; but if processing power were all it took we would already have AI running on supercomputing clusters that are at least as smart as a reasonably intelligent animal, but we don't. Things like vision and learning continue to be extremely simple for animals and extremely difficult for AI. Some of that is because we've evolved specialized hardware that shortcuts most of the tricky stuff for us, so biological life has an extra advantage, but some of it is because we don't know how to engineer that specialized hardware for AI because we don't really know how it works.
 
CPA

CPA

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Nov 19, 2001
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Okay, for us not up to speed on the progress of transistor development, what is the third state? The other two are "on" and "off" (0 and 1), right? So, the third is....?
 
Rakehellion

Rakehellion

Lifer
Jan 15, 2013
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Nothing will change. Disks will get bigger and chips will get faster, but that would happen anyway.
 
Rakehellion

Rakehellion

Lifer
Jan 15, 2013
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cpa said:
okay, for us not up to speed on the progress of transistor development, what is the third state? The other two are "on" and "off" (0 and 1), right? So, the third is....?
Click to expand...

0, 1, 2

So I guess you could store a byte in five bits instead of eight.
 
Ruptga

Ruptga

Lifer
Aug 3, 2006
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You can call the states whatever you want, both 0,1,2 and -1,0,1 have been used. In a three-state transistor 0 (no power flow), 1 (power flow), and -1 (negative power flow) seems the most intuitive to me.
 
CPA

CPA

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Nov 19, 2001
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Ruptga said:
You can call the states whatever you want, both 0,1,2 and -1,0,1 have been used. In a three-state transistor 0 (no power flow), 1 (power flow), and -1 (negative power flow) seems the most intuitive to me.
Click to expand...
Negative power flow? What the...
 
M

Mark R

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Negative voltage, reverse current, etc.

e.g. instead of +5V for 1, and 0V for 0, you could have +5V for +1, 0V for 0 and -5V for -1.

The soviets did a lot of experimental work with balanced ternary (+1,0,-1) computers, because it could reduce the amount of logic required because large numbers would need fewer gates. In particular, things like multiplication used a lot less logic and were faster than binary, because the carry chains were much shorter.

Conventional transistors and tubes were a better match for binary than ternary, so the construction of ternary computers was awkward. It could be done, they had developed three-state transistors. However, binary was more practical because it used simpler transistors and simpler logic gates with much simpler behavior.
 
videogames101

videogames101

Diamond Member
Aug 24, 2005
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I really don't know what you mean by "three state transistor". Could you explain? A modern FET for digital applications is switched on or off which might be what you are referring to as a state. Do you want a transistor that can be on, off, or reversed by applying a particular gate voltage? That doesn't really make sense, because either the channel in the FET is present, not present, or somewhere in between. If you want to use the somewhere in between region as a sort of voltage divider to get a third voltage, you'll end up with a whole lot of power usage because all of your transistors will be turning on at once.

What you're really looking for I think is a circuit design with 3 supply-voltages and normal transistors arranged in fancy ways with sort of 3 state flops.
 
Cerb

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
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brianmanahan said:
2 bits at the same time
Click to expand...
That would need 4 states.

I don't see a tristate transistor doing much of anything for computing.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.1022.pdf
That, I believe, is what the OP intended to link to. That's all analog signal work, where tristate logic is regularly done, already. For that, it would make a lot of sense, and could lead to reduced cost and/or improved performance for line and radio stuff. For computing, not really. If it were efficient enough to be used for such, we wouldn't even have to know (Intel would brag about having it first, show slides with steep curves and lots of blue, and our next CPUs might be a little faster).
 
theeedude

theeedude

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
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It's not clear that it would bring anything. You'd need twice the voltage swing to send 3 states, power per transition scales as square of voltage, so it's cheaper to first order to send two 2 state bits than one double swing 3 state bit at 2x swing. Computation is now power limited across the board, so if it's not bringing power savings, it probably isn't going to contribute much.
 
William Gaatjes

William Gaatjes

Lifer
May 11, 2008
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I never heard of a three-state transistor but three state logic is nothing special.
The output of a three-state gate can be logic 0, logic 1 and high impedance.
A three-state output is made of two transistors, one to pass the logic 1 level and one to pass the logic 0 level.
When the upper transistor conducts, the lower transistor is not conducting : 1. When the lower transistor conducts, the upper transistor is not conducting : 0.
When both transistors do not conduct, the output is electrically floating, high impedance. In high impedance state, the output is disabled.

A three-state input can detect a logic 1 state, a logic 0 state and a high impedance state. 1 is for example 5V. 0 is GND level and high impedance state is 2,5V.

Three-state inputs are often used for configuration of LSI digital and analog chips and saves on physical pins.

Three-state outputs are used all the time on any digital bus.
It allows for connecting outputs together to make use of the same signal lines.
 
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