Flip-flop (electronics)

For the type of shoes (sandals), see Flip-flops

In electronics, a flip-flop or latch is a circuit that has two stable states and can be used to store information. Signals applied to control inputs can change the circuit’s state. It is the basic storage element in sequential logic. Flip-flops and latches are fundamental building blocks of digital electronics systems used in computers, communications, and many other types of systems.

Flip-flops are mainly used as static RAM to store data in a computer. That data is represented in binary. Binary is represented in a 1 (“high state”) and 0 (“low state”). The structure of flip flops vary, but the general characteristic is that two branches affect each other's state by putting the current resulting state of one branch and using that as input for the next iteration of the other branch.