Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-is-all-you-need dept.

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/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:05AM (4 children)

    by tftp (806) on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:05AM (#668890) Homepage
    As the comments to the article say, it's not a flip-flop, but a single-bit DRAM cell.
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:19AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:19AM (#668893) Journal

    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)

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:49AM (#668961)

      Sure, but that's no excuse for not reading TFA!

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:20AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:20AM (#668975) Journal

        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

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:02AM (#668910)

    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]