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On Naming Two-Input Ternary Gates

A project log for Tern - Ternary Logic Circuits

A series of ternary logic gates and higher level components implemented in the real world.

mechanical-advantageMechanical Advantage 07/29/2015 at 06:270 Comments

I've been thinking about how to give each of the 19,683 two-input gates their own names that won't be ridiculously long, but which will uniquely identify each one. I couldn't find anyone having proposed a solution, but came up with a pretty good one. Take the truth table for the Implication gate.

-0+
BBB
-A+++
0A00+
+A-0+

There are three rows of three values. I simply take each row, and find the monadic gate associated with that pattern of values. In this example the first row is +++, which corresponds to a monadic Z gate, the second is 00+, an R gate, and the final row is -0+, a P gate. So this gate would be designated a ZRP gate. This solves the problem of the many thousands of gates that will never have a name but might pop up from time to time in some design or another. I'm sure the gates found to be useful will eventually develop colloquial names, but for all the others this should suffice.

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