T3L: A Practical Implementation of Tri-Transistor Ternary Logic Based on Inkjet-Printed Anti-Ambipolar Transistors and CMOSs of Thin-Film Structure

The imminent rise in data consumption and the physical constraints of current advanced CMOS scaling hasten the end of the projection to the binary system. For a breakthrough of these issues, the ternary system, known for its superior efficiency in expressing numbers (closest to
$\mathrm {e}\approx ~2.7183$
) has garnered considerable attention. Among the ternary studies reported, the anti-ambipolar transistor (AAT) is acquiring attention thanks to its unique negative differential resistance (NDR) and anti-ambipolar characteristics (AAC). Moreover, easy-to-fabricate inkjet-printing based AAT was introduced. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a practical design methodology (‘
$\mathbf {T^{3}L:} $
The Tri-transistor Ternary Logic’) and a set of novel ternary logic based on inkjet-printed AATs and CMOSs. In detail, 1) We propose balanced ternary full adders (BTFA) and prove that inkjet-printed AATs and CMOSs are highly capable of implementing any kind of ternary logic. 2) We propose two design methodologies for ternary logic design: NDR-based Design Method I and AAC-based Design Method II. 3) We present optimization methodology for inkjet-printed ternary circuit stability and provide circuitry to secure sufficient noise margin. We provide a highly-compact BTFA design that requires only 64 transistors and an ultra-low-power BTFA design that reduces power by 84.7% to 98.8% compared to the previous designs.