With the development of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the feature size of mental-oxide-semiconductor field-effect-transistor (MOSFET) is continuously shrunk, the short channel effect becomes more and more serious, which makes the static power consumption increase, and now the static power consumption becomes a main source of the power consumption of the integrated circuits. Currently, the performance of CMOS binary logic processor is approaching a bottleneck; therefore the ternary logic becomes a research hotspot to promote the development of high-performance low-power integrated circuits. Compared with binary logic, ternary logic possesses a strong data expression capability, which can not only improve the data density, but also reduce the circuit power consumption and the system complexity. However, using binary devices to build ternary logic circuits requires a large number of components, and even the passive components, which makes it impossible to leverage the advantages of ternary logic. The other method of implementing ternary logic is to utilize innovative two-dimensional materials. This method requires a small number of components and obviates the need for passive components, but it faces the problem that the fabrication process is not mature and cannot be mass-produced. To solve these problems, in this paper by combining the tunneling and the drift diffusion mechanism, we propose a tunneling metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (TMOSFET) with three-state characteristics that make it highly suitable for ternary logic design. Compared with other ternary logic schemes, the ternary inverter based on TMOSFET has the same circuit structure as binary inverter, which can simplify the circuit design. In this paper, the operational mechanism of this ternary inverter is studied, and the condition of three-state output of inverter is analyzed. It is found that when the operating voltage V _DDand the device turning voltage V _turnsatisfy V _DD/ V _turn≈ 1.4, the input voltage ranges of the three output states are equivalent. In addition, the influence of TMOSFET transfer characteristic on this ternary inverter is also analyzed. This has certain reference significance for designing and studying ternary logic circuits in future.