A complete standard cell library and arithmetic engine for balanced ternary logic, operating on photonic trit signals from the SWCNT@MWCNT transducer.
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.
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.
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.
The optical-ternary gate library is available for licensing to EDA companies and research institutions.
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