"Not" Gate Made from Three Carbon Nanotubes at IBM

IBM inventor Huilong Zhu created a nanoelectromechanical digital inverter made from 3 carbon nanotubes earning U.S. Patent 7,612,270. A digital inverter (also referred to as a "NOT" gate) is considered to be a basic building block for all digital electronics. For example, memory (1 bit register) may be built as a latch by feeding the output of two serial inverters together. Multiplexers, decoders, state machines, and other sophisticated digital devices all rely on the basic inverter.