4 ms·

So the charge is work and the discharge is waste? I guess I am entertaining the idea of an idealized Maxwell-demon CMOS circuit, if we could bounce the charge

• timerol 3y ago
  That's a reasonable way to think about it - you take energy from the supply voltage to charge the gate capacitor when the logic line goes high, then dump it when the logic line goes low. If you had a lossless bidirectional voltage converter circuit for each gate capacitance, then you could charge the capacitor from the supply and discharge it back into the supply, removing any switching losses.
• Dylan16807 3y ago
  They're both waste. Charging a capacitor to 1 volt means your average input voltage is .5 and half your energy goes to heat. Discharging to a ground line wastes the other half. As the sibling comment says, you would need voltage converters running both ways to avoid this waste.