Monster 6502

[drlegendre .]

So what's the reasoning behind using gate capacitance (or inductance) to
store the bit state? It would seem obvious that setting a bi-stable hi or
lo would be a much more reliable method of saving the state.

Is it a matter of power consumption, or switching speed, or both?

On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:

> On 2016-May-28, at 6:22 PM, drlegendre . wrote:
> >
> > Could someone also clarify what is meant by "gates" in this sense? Are we
> > talking about the gates (G) of a FET, as in Gate, Drain and Source - or
> are
> > we referring to the composite logic gates (NAND, etc.), built up of
> > multiple bipolar - or MOS - transistors?
>
> Yes, they're talking FET gates, the internal registers would operate under
> the same basic principle as DRAM does.
>
> Other early microprocs used dynamic registers, I forget which, perhaps
> others can list them.
>
> Far from the first time a processor had dynamic registers.
> I've been told that the IBM 709 used inductive (rather than capacitive)
> storage for the main registers.