– Transistors and their connection to logic gates.
In: Engineering
Logic gates are an abstraction. They represent the idea of taking binary inputs and giving binary outputs. Transistors are electronic components that are used to implement logic gates in physical hardware.
Imagine you have a pipe with two valves built in, and you need both valves open to let water through, you’ve got yourself a hydraulic AND gate. If you have the pipe split in two and rejoin again, with both sides of the split getting a valve, you’ve got a hydraulic OR gate.
To complete the analogy, say instead of turning the valves by hand you invent a valve controlled by water pressure. If you have both a valve that turns on when it’s actuated, as well as one that turns the water off when it’s actuated, that’s actually a pretty good analogy for how certain types of transistor work. Now you can feed the output of one gate into the input of the next, and you’re away building a hydraulic computer.
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