[all2]

During my intro to computer engineering course, lectures touched on why NAND gates, and the conclusion was that you can build anything you need in a basic computer using NAND gates. It boils down to expense. A BOM (bill of materials) with fewer line items tends to be cheaper.

This doesn't really hold in today's world of silicon prints, but at the start I think it was price that drove the decision.

[tankenmate]

Actually if you take an XOR gate with a naive translation into NAND gates you would use 20 transistors, but if you don't need a large fan out from the output you can actually do it with 6 transistors using a pass gate layout (which is neither NAND nor NOR). So typically you don't use NAND vs NOR because of transistor count.

[all2]

Oh! Good to know. Thank you!