Skip to main content

How Does an Inverter (NOT) Gate Work - NOT Gate Explained


For a video version of this tutorial, please refer to this link.

An inverter gate, or NOR gate for short, is one of the essential logic gates used constructed digital circuits. As implied by its name, the NOT gate works by taking an input, inverting it, then outputting the inverted value.

The NOT gate schematic symbol looks like a triangle with clown nose on the Output side (as shown in the Figure above).

In logic circuits, inputs and outputs are binary, which means their value can either be 0 or 1. So:

  • If NOT receives a 0 at the input, it will output 1.
  • If NOT receives 1 at the input, it will output 0.


To sum it up, the truth table for the NOT gate will be as the following:

Input Output
X F
0 1
1 0

The NOT gate can be algebraically represented as the following: 

F = X' (or you can have a bar above the X)
where :   F is the output and X is the input


Popular posts from this blog

Logic Gate Truth Tables - Reference Guide (Cheat Sheet)

A logic gate is the implementation of a Boolean function. It performs a logic operation on one or more binary input. By binary I mean that the input can either be 1 or 0, nothing else. This guide is intended to be quick guide\reference, I will dive into more details about each gate on transistor\diode level in other posts. The guide cover gates with 2 inputs, meaning that each truth table will have 4 cases (2^2 = 4) AND Gate: Boolean Logic Operator: Q = A  •  B  Input Output A B Q 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 Summary: in order to achieve 1 on the output, both inputs A AND B must be 1 OR Gate: Boolean Logic Operator: Q = A  +  B  Input Output A B Q 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 Summary: in order to ...

LTspice Tutorial: How to Design and Simulate a Circuit in LTspice

 If you do not have LTSpice already installed on your machine, please head over to LTSpice's page on Analog Device's website (Link: LTspice Information Center | Analog Devices ). Note: a video version of this tutorial is available here  Click on the applicable download button that suits your machine's operating system. Upon successfully downloading and launching LTspice, you will be greeted with a window that looks something like in the figure below. Alright, now we will need to create a new schematic. That can be done by either of the following approaches:  click on File then choose New Schematic . click on the New Schematic symbol   on the toolbar. on your keyboard, press Ctrl+N . Upon doing so, a new grey-ish screen will pop up... that will be your new empty schematic (just like the one in the figure below). In this example, we will try to design and simulate a very basic voltage divider.  To recap: a voltage divider is a circuit that takes a certain i...

Hercules Motor Controller Library Reference Guide (Controlling the DC Motors)

This guide is not intended to be a tutorial on how to setup the Hercules Motor Controller (HMC) and install its library. If you need help with that, please visit the following link: CLICK HERE (^_^) First, we will need to include the Hercules Motor Controller library so we can use its functions to control the DC motors connected to the HMC, please add #include <Hercules.h> to the top of your source code like in the picture below: To control the motors, we will be using a function called 'MOTOR' followed by an action: To Initialize the DC Motors, we write: MOTOR.begin(); To run them: MOTOR.setRun1(); MOTOR.setRun2(); where setRun1 will run the motor(s) connected to the terminal M1 and setRun2 will run the motor(s) connected to the terminal M2 To stop them: MOTOR.setStop1(); MOTOR.setStop2(); where  setStop1  will stop the motor(s) connected to the terminal M1 and  setStop2  will stop the motor(s) connected to the terminal M2...