The beauty of digital is you are avoiding the “linear” portion of transistors and are always running them saturated. A ternary machine would require running the

The beauty of digital is you are avoiding the “linear” portion of transistors and are always running them saturated. A ternary machine would require running the transistors in the linear region - which ultra small transistors are terrible at. There are alternative designs using +/0/- saturated signaling but those have higher voltages and larger transistor counts. I’ve played around with linear designs which can indeed use fewer parts but you need high quality transistors and they’d still be slow. https://hackaday.io/project/3628-trinity/log/11995-2-transistor-carry-function https://hackaday.io/project/3628-trinity/log/11995-2-transis...