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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: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:41AM (1 child)
My thoughts exactly, but also you forgot the clock.
Sure, you might have a clock anyway hanging around on a board but adding it to flip a single bit of storage seems a bit of desperation. The second transistor would be all around cheaper and more reliable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:45AM
You could argue that there's greater benefit when you need multiple flip-flops (all driven by a single clock), but the designer states (in the project discussion) that that's most likely to be useful if you're building your system out of vacuum tubes rather than modern transistors.