Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
A flip-flop is one of the most basic digital electronic circuits. It can most easily be built from just two transistors, although they can and have been built out of vacuum tubes, NAND and NOR gates, and Minecraft redstone. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a flip-flop with just one transistor, but here we are. [roelh] has built a flip-flop circuit using only one transistor and some bizarre logic that's been slowly developing over on hackaday.io.
[...] The single-transistor flip-flop works just like any other flip-flop — there are set and reset pulses, and a feedback loop to keep the whatever state the output is in alive. The key difference here is the addition of a clock signal. This clock, along with a few capacitors and a pair of diodes, give this single transistor the ability to store a single bit of information, just like any other flip-flop.
That's damned nifty.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/18/the-one-transistor-flip-flop/
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:05AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:19AM (2 children)
A bit that takes a while to read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:49AM (1 child)
Sure, but that's no excuse for not reading TFA!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:20AM
I read it. It's intellectually interesting, I can't find a use for it myself for the moment, good to keep a bookmark on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:02AM
When I see "flip-flop", I think "bistable multivibrator".
That typically has 1 connection each for power, ground, input, and output.
It's sometimes used as a divide-by-2 element (e.g. to get octaves in electronic organs).
FTFS: a clock signal
What this thing is is a D flip-flop ("D" for "data").
As you say, that's a 1-bit RAM.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]