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There is the classic flip-flop using two transistors. I now tried to extend it to be able to store more than 2 states, and thought it'd be interesting to be able to extend it to 3 or an arbitrary number of states and came up with following design:
To activate any of the 3 states we use a switch to pull the corresponding base down, and to store the information we use an OR-gate using diodes from the other states.

Now my issue is, for implementing n states, the number of diodes scales quadratically (that is we need n*(n-1) diodes), so I was wondering - purely out of curiosity, with no practical application in mind:

Is there a way to extend the classic transistor flipflop to n states, where the number of components just stays O(n)?

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ocrdu
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flawr
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    Have a search for `ring counter` and you'll find lots of implementations of very many knids, including [Dekker's](https://www.dos4ever.com/ring/ring.html) page. – jonathanjo Oct 23 '22 at 01:05
  • @jonathanjo Thanks for the link! I did look through various implementations of ring counters, but I did not understand how you could adapt them to this problem of basically storing what switch was closed last. As I understand it, with ring counters you can only "increment" them, but the states have a strict order that you cannot violate. Could you give me a hint on what I'm misunderstanding or elaborate how you can adapt them? – flawr Oct 24 '22 at 14:14

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