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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


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