Do transistors calculate the output? If so, wouldn’t transistors be the most fundamental logic of computers?
Thanks.
In: Technology
Compute is probably the wrong word at the level of a transistor. At this level you’re just describing components. Transistors don’t compute as they alone don’t allow you to recognize any mathematical output for a given input. They simply control the flow of electricity. You need wires, at least two transistors, a voltage source, and a voltage drain to create a unit of computation called a gate. A gate is a configuration of electrical components, that’s flow of current represents a mathematical computation on some input to derive an output; it only means something because it can be interpreted by a human. A gate is the smallest unit of computation because nothing smaller actually computes anything, whereas a transistor, like a wire or a voltage source, cannot represent any mathematical process. The two fundamental gates are NOT and NAND (or NOR) and all other computations can be generated from configurations of these gates.
Edit: I want to say there *is* a trivial computation that can be performed by just a single wire: the identity function, f(A) = A. This is computed by simply connecting an input pin to an output pin. This is not very interesting and it can’t be used to construct more interesting computation so it’s not really fair to call a wire the basic unit of computation.
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