Quantum Mechanics of Digital Excitation

Abstract

The characteristics of the cascaded digital gates in a large-scale chain or mesh structure, where the switching transients develop by traveling signal fronts, are examined in Chapter 1. In this chapter, I proceed to study the characteristics of the transients created in the gate-field, which I call excitation. The most fundamental attribute of an excitation is that it is an undividable whole and has its own identification. Particles and waves in three-dimensional physical space are examples of excitation. An excitation carries energy, information, and, often, mass. Thus, digital signals propagating in a logic-gate chain are excitations created in the gate-field. The nature of an excitation reflects the background properties of the field. Since I stressed the similarities between physical space and the gate-field in Chapter 1, here I begin by pointing out the differences between the two. The differences are crucial to an understanding of digital excitation in digital circuits. There are four fundamental differences between physical space and the digital gate-field, which reflect back to the excitations they support:

• (1) The physical space is continuous with respect to any of the three spatial coordinates, down to the presently accessible limit, but the digital-gate field is discrete, having the integer node-location index.

• (2) A point in physical space exercises a noninverting influence on its neighbor point, but the digital-gate field may exercise either inverting or noninverting influence on its immediate neighbor, depending on the structure of the individual point of the gate-field. This is an important resource for adding variety and flexibility to the gate-field model.

• (3) Physical space appears to allow an infinitely large dynamic range of field variables, but the digital-gate field allows only a limited dynamic range of the gate-field variables. The gate-field has a power supply as the energy source that does not allow the voltage variable to exceed the range set by it. Certain field variable values are asymptotic values: An idealized excitation in a finite range may extend over the entire range of the gate-location index, and as the gate location index tends to plus or minus infinity, the field variable takes the asymptotic values at the infinities.

• (4) An excitation in a physical space moves in any direction of physical space, but a digital excitation in a conventional structure moves only in one direction. To make it bidirectional, a certain structure and definition are required (see Section 1.03).