Memory, Interconnect
+ Hardware Trit-Trie Search

Overview

This patent covers the memory subsystem, bus architecture, and interconnect fabric for the photonic-ternary computing system. Every address, data word, and control signal is natively balanced ternary — there is no binary translation layer.

The centrepiece of this patent is the hardware trit-trie: a circuit that implements a ternary prefix tree directly in hardware. Each node in the trie branches on three trit values (−1, 0, +1), enabling O(k) associative lookup on trit-encoded keys of depth k. This provides hardware-accelerated search for the TritFS filesystem, page tables, and other data structures in the ternary OS.

The fabric management hardware handles memory allocation, bus arbitration, and interconnect routing — all operating in balanced ternary. The memory bus carries trit-width data with ternary addressing, connecting the processor (Thatte3) to storage and I/O.

Key Innovations

• Hardware trit-trie circuit with O(k) ternary associative lookup
• Three-way branching at each trie node (−1, 0, +1) — natural for balanced ternary keys
• Natively ternary memory bus — no binary translation overhead
• Trit-addressed memory with balanced ternary page tables
• Fabric management hardware for ternary allocation and bus arbitration
• TritFS filesystem support with trit-addressed inodes and ternary bitmap allocator

Technical Approach

The trit-trie exploits the fact that balanced ternary keys naturally decompose into sequences of {−1, 0, +1} values. At each level of the trie, the hardware examines one trit of the key and routes to one of three child nodes. This gives a worst-case depth equal to the key length in trits, with no hashing collisions and deterministic lookup time.

The memory architecture uses trit-addressed storage where each address is a balanced ternary number. This means the address space is symmetric around zero — negative addresses are as natural as positive ones. Page table entries, TLB lookups, and virtual-to-physical translation all operate in balanced ternary.

Verification

The trit-trie data structure is implemented in the THATTEOS kernel (Thatte6) and has been compiled to T3ISA machine code and executed on the T3ISA emulator. The hardware trit-trie circuit specification is part of the multi-scale simulation stack verified in April 2026.

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