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The “reliability” of a logic gate describes its mean time between failure (MTBF). Digital machines often have millions of logic gates. Also, most digital machines are “optimized” to reduce their cost. The result is that often, the failure of a single logic gate will cause a digital machine to stop working.

It is possible to design machines to be more reliable by using redundant logic which will not malfunction as a result of the failure of any single gate (or even any two, three, or four gates), but this necessarily entails using more components, which raises the financial cost and also usually increases the weight of the machine and may increase the power it consumes.

COST & LOGIC

The cost of a logic gate is crucial, primarily because very many gates are needed to build a computer or other advanced digital system and because the more gates can be used, the more capable and/or fast the machine can be. Since the majority of a digital computer is simply an interconnected network of logic gates.

Digital machines first became useful when the MTBF for a switch got above a few hundred hours. Even so, many of these machines had complex, well-rehearsed repair procedures, and would be nonfunctional for hours because a tube burned-out, or a moth got stuck in a relay.

Modern transistorized integrated circuit logic gates have MTBFs greater than 82 billion hours (8.2×1010) hours, and need them because they have so many logic gates. Fanout describes how many logic inputs can be controlled by a single logic output without exceeding the electrical current ratings of the gate outputs. The earliest integrated circuits were a happy accident.

COST BUILDING

The overall cost of building a computer correlates strongly with the price per logic gate. In the 1930s, the earliest digital logic systems were constructed from telephone relays because these were inexpensive and relatively reliable. After that, engineers always used the cheapest available electronic switches that could still fulfill the requirements.