What is Tritium?
Tritium is a research project dealing with balanced ternary computing. It’s meant to explore and create balanced ternary components rather than create a fully functional ternary computer. However, creating a fully functional balanced ternary computer may be done after each component is researched and prototyped.
What is balanced ternary?
Normal computers process data in binary which means two states, a one and a zero. Ternary is similar except operating on three states. In balanced ternary, there is a negative (i), neutral (0), and positive (1) which means numbers are naturally signed thus simplifying the architecture and general logic. Ternary also has the best radix efficiency for any integer base of 1.0046 where binary is 1.0615 with base e, 1.0000 being the most efficient. A ’trit’ is the ternary analogue of a bit which stores an i (-1), 0, or 1.
What is the point?
Balanced ternary may prove to be the key to get pass physical limits that we’re hitting with current binary computers where the transitors just can’t get any smaller. Adding another state to the gates will not only make the computer require less transistors, it’d increase data density since more data can be stored in three states versus two.