J

I cannot say how light and open I am feeling in the DLD class. Thanks to Professor Nasir Mehmood, his
methodology is just amazing, I love it.

Following the lecture one of DLD, I came across some interesting knowledge that I could not hold myself
to share with you guys.

Leaving the rest, what I found interesting was the technologies and terms like digital, bits, transistors,
etc and a trit.

A successful transfer of data follows the following process in general:

Coder -> Transmitter -> Decoder

We discussed that a bit a binary number that can have two levels/values that are 0 or 1.

Given the analog data, we need to convert it to bits first that is we need a hardware that somehow can
take two states/levels [and switches between them very quickly for large data transit]. And eventually
scientists developed a device named Transistor that switched between the two levels [on and off] very
quickly and efficiently.

Then we need to think of a transmitter. Take an example, Modulation [Amplitude Modulation-AM,

frequency Modulation- FM and Phase modulation-PM] or the optical fiber.

Lets consider the optical fiber case. In this case, weuse light as a transmitting medium [say], Light on
means 1 and Light Off means 0. And a transistor can quickly switch a light source on and off [that is
transistor as a switch].

The we discussed about a TRIT [Not explicitly though]. A trit is basically a ternary number that has three
states say 0 , 1, 2.

The first question is why do we need a trit?

Now, suppose we make characters from two bits say: Now all the combinations for two bits may be:

0 0 -> A

0 1 -> B
1 1 -> C

1 0 -> D

Now consider a pair of trits:

0 0 -> A

0 1 -> B

0 2 -> C

1 0-> D

1 1 -> E

1 2-> f

2 0-> G

2 1-> H

2 2 -> I

So a pair of bits can represent only four characters [2 ^ n} but a trit can nine [3^ n]. So a trit is more data
dense than a trit.

Now making a Hardware that can take three levels/stages [0 , 1, 2] is the real task.

Wait, cannot we use a Transistor?

I was wondering about this myself a while ago. There are many possible answers, but perhaps
the most practical reason is power consumption. A typical transistor used in a modern integrated
circuit dissipates nearly zero power when it's in either logical 0 or 1 state. (Either the collector-
emitter voltage is nearly zero, or the collector current is nearly zero.)

Thus, in a contemporary chip, we can say that a transistor will only dissipate considerable
amounts of power when it is in the process of changing between the two states, and consumes
very low power when it is holding a particular state.

Imagine if there were more than two possible states (other values "in-between"), transistors
would consume orders of magnitude more power even when the system is doing nothing, thus
rendering the thing economically unfeasible. This is (one of the reasons) why the vast majority of
our digital circuits are binary.

This can be understood more easily as:

Go around your house, or if you dont have any of these kinds of switches go to a hardware
store, see how easy or hard it is to put and leave the switch in the middle of on an off, adding a
third state, now try to see if you cant make for distinguished positions.

Using a transistor as a switch is very easy, drive it to one rail or the other, easy to sense the
output. Now if you were to try to have all the transistors not be on off switches but instead
calibrated to different ranges one for each state (in addition to all on and all off, two middle
states as you suggest). Now the entire system has to be much more accurate, expensive, subject
to error and failure, etc.

Basically this was tried, some early computers tried to be decimal (10 voltage levels), it failed.

A few ternary computers using ternary logic were built mainly in the Soviet Union as research projects.

There are actually cases where more than two levels are used today to encode digital data. There
are some bulk flash memories that work on this principle. Data is stored in piles of charge. These
piles can have more than 2 sizes. It does take extra complexity to decode the size of the piles
when a read is performed, but in the case of large flash memories that extra complexity is spent
only a few times in read circuitry while the compression savings is applied to many millions of
bits, so the tradeoff is worth it.

Note that there are Flash devices which use multiple levels to store more than 1 bit in a single
memory cell, that's MLC (Multi-Level Cell) Flash. That doesn't increase speed, but packs more
data on a single chip.

Now, the question is we need a Device that very quickly switches among all the three states with no
power loss at all.

Well the theories are there.

Some theories suggest that fiber optics could use light frequencies (i.e.color) to differentiate
states thereby allowing a near infinite (depending on resolution of the detection unit) number of
base possibilities.

Well, I was navigating through the web and found a theory that we can use the polarization of light as a
for this purpose.

One level is the light off that is no light at all and the second one is the light on. Now we further divide
light on into two levels one say Plane polarized [light on] and the other circular polarized [light on].

Now all we need is the polarizer that can switch on and off very quickly.

I am not gonna talk more about a trit but consider the following image.
In the above image we can switch on and off current quickly with a transistor, now I dont know whether
it means we can polarize the light that much quickly too.

Question as a Task.

What is difference between a single four level digit say [fit after bit and trit] and a pair of bits?

By the way, for your information:

All digital storage on this planet is 4-state. DNA encodes data as one of four base pairs per bit,
arranged in bytes of 3 bits each. Each byte therefore can have 64 different states.

Harvard cracks the DNA storage having a unbelievable memory density of 7 hundred TB per gram. It
does so by converting the zeros and ones into TGAC say a four bit system.