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And the first thing you do to them is to convert them to binary.

Look at any Ethernet PHY for example - you have that nice 5-level signal coming on.. and the first thing you do is feed it into AFE/ADC so you get digital signals that you can actually work with.

So yes, in some specific situations, like Flash memory or interconnects, there are multi-level signals. But the computing itself is always binary.

I’ve wondered any number of times if 4 level gates would be useful to increase cache memory in CPUs. They aren’t great for logic, but how much decoding would they need to expand an L3 cache?

What is PAM in this context?

Pulse amplitude modulation

Thanks. That’s a deep rabbit hole upon initial glances to say the least