Common Fallacies about Multivalued Circuits

Abstract

For more than 60 years, many ternary or quaternary circuits have been proposed based on similar assumptions. We successively examine four of these assumptions and demonstrate that they are wrong. The fundamental reason for which m-valued combinational circuits are more complicated than the corresponding binary ones is explained. M-valued flash memories are used in USB devices because access times in not critical and a trade-off is possible between access time and chip area. If m-valued circuits are reduced to a very small niche in the binary world with semi-conductor technologies, there is a significant exception: quantum devices and computers are a true breakthrough as qbits are intrinsically multivalued. Successful m-valued circuits need m-valued devices as qbits.