Evolution of Technologies and Multivalued Circuits

Abstract: For more than 45 years, many multi-valued circuits have been presented. With very rare exceptions, they have been unsuccessful for fundamental reasons that can be explained. Each time a new circuit technology is presented, a lot of new MVL circuits are proposed. Can new circuit technologies overcome the fundamental disadvantages of MVL circuits? The evolution of IC technologies in the last decades unfortunately increases the disadvantage of MVL circuits versus binary ones. For non conventional technologies, only quantum devices look promising, even if implementation is challenging and applications are restricted to a small niche.