Optical-Ternary Gate Library
+ Arithmetic Engine

Overview

This patent defines a complete optical-ternary standard cell library for balanced ternary logic design. Every gate in the library operates on photonic trit signals produced by the SWCNT@MWCNT transducer (Thatte1), accepting inputs as signed current values (+1, 0, −1) and producing outputs in the same encoding.

The arithmetic engine uses Kirchhoff's Current Law (KCL) at junction nodes for natural ternary computation. Because currents sum physically at a node, balanced ternary addition is performed by the circuit topology itself — no binary encoding or conversion is needed at any point in the computation.

The gate library provides the building blocks for every higher layer in the stack: the processor (Thatte3), memory interconnect (Thatte4), and cryptographic hardware (Thatte5) are all composed from these optical-ternary standard cells.

Key Innovations

• Complete optical-ternary standard cell library with balanced ternary semantics
• KCL-based arithmetic engine — current summation as native ternary addition
• Ternary inverter with perfect symmetry: INV(+1) = −1, INV(0) = 0, INV(−1) = +1
• MIN/MAX gates for ternary logic operations (analogues of AND/OR)
• Majority gate with full 27-entry truth table for consensus logic
• Carry propagation circuits designed for balanced ternary arithmetic

Technical Approach

In balanced ternary, the natural logic operations are MIN (ternary AND), MAX (ternary OR), and INV (ternary NOT). Unlike binary logic where AND/OR/NOT form a complete basis, balanced ternary additionally benefits from the majority function — MAJ(a, b, c) returns the median of three trit values.

The arithmetic engine avoids the carry-chain bottleneck of binary adders. In balanced ternary, the carry from any single-trit addition is always in {−1, 0, +1}, and the sum and carry can be computed from the KCL node currents directly. This gives a natural, physics-based implementation of ternary arithmetic.

Verification

The gate library was verified using SPICE simulation with the RAVAN compact model — a physics-based model built from Landauer transport, virtual source, and Fermi-Dirac statistics. Every gate in the library was simulated with all input combinations, confirming correct truth tables and symmetric switching characteristics.

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