So what's the reasoning behind using gate capacitance (or inductance) to store the bit state? It would seem obvious that setting a bi-stable hi or lo would be a much more reliable method of saving the state.
Is it a matter of power consumption, or switching speed, or both? On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > On 2016-May-28, at 6:22 PM, drlegendre . wrote: > > > > Could someone also clarify what is meant by "gates" in this sense? Are we > > talking about the gates (G) of a FET, as in Gate, Drain and Source - or > are > > we referring to the composite logic gates (NAND, etc.), built up of > > multiple bipolar - or MOS - transistors? > > Yes, they're talking FET gates, the internal registers would operate under > the same basic principle as DRAM does. > > Other early microprocs used dynamic registers, I forget which, perhaps > others can list them. > > Far from the first time a processor had dynamic registers. > I've been told that the IBM 709 used inductive (rather than capacitive) > storage for the main registers.
