Question

explain binary coded decimal

Answer 1

[AI-generated answer — Bot]

Binary coded decimal (BCD) is a digital encoding scheme used to represent decimal numbers. In BCD, each decimal digit is represented by a binary code of four bits, also known as a nibble.

For example, the decimal number 321 would be represented in BCD as:

0011 0010 0001

The first nibble represents the digit 3, the second nibble represents the digit 2, and the third nibble represents the digit 1.

BCD is commonly used in electronic devices such as calculators, digital clocks, and measuring instruments where decimal numbers are frequently used. One advantage of BCD representation is that it makes decimal arithmetic easy to perform using binary logic operations.

However, BCD requires more storage space than pure binary representation, as the same number requires more bits to represent. For instance, the decimal number 99 would require only 8 bits in pure binary representation but needs 16 bits in BCD.