Some properties of the tunnel diode balanced pair circuit

The tunnel diode balanced pair circuit has been widely publicized as a potentially very fast computing element. On a very small scale it has been shown to work at more than 1 kMc/s. There are however several aspects of this circuit which make it difficult to use. This paper attempts to expose a few of the problems associated with the balanced pair as it might be used in an actual computing system. Some of these problems have been overcome, others are being investigated and it seems likely that a complete system based on tunnel diodes can be brought into operation in the reasonably near future.