Wires and nets
Schematics have their own vocabulary, and the rest of this course uses it freely. Start with the simplest element.
- Wire: a physical connection carrying one bit
- Net: one electrically connected piece of a circuit. A net can touch many gates, but it holds one value at a time.
- Fan-out: the number of inputs a single output drives
One net, one value. If two gates drove the same net they could disagree, so in ordinary logic every net has exactly one driver.