Comment by amelius
> The main way to reduce unnecessary heat generation in transistor use—to operate them adiabatically—is to ramp the control voltage slowly instead of jumping it up or down abruptly.
But if you change the gate voltage slowly, then the transistor will be for a longer period in the resistive region where it dissipates energy. Shouldn't you go between the OFF and ON states as quickly as possible?
The trick is not to have a voltage across the channel while it's transitioning states. For this reason, adiabatic circuits are typically "phased" such that any given adiabatic logic gate is either having its gates charged or discharged (by the previous logic gate), or current is passing through its channels to charge/discharge the next logic gate.