BINARY-CODED DECIMAL

1-59 Q106. 3E6.5₁₆ BINARY-CODED DECIMAL In today’s technology, you hear a great deal about microprocessors. A microprocessor is an integrated circuit designed for two purposes: data processing and control. Computers and microprocessors both operate on a series of electrical pulses called words. A word can be represented by a binary number such as 10110011₂. The word length is described by the number of digits or BITS in the series. A series of four digits would be called a 4-bit word and so forth. The most common are 4-, 8-, and 16-bit words. Quite often, these words must use binary-coded decimal inputs. Binary-coded decimal, or BCD, is a method of using binary digits to represent the decimal digits 0 through 9. A decimal digit is represented by four binary digits, as shown below: You should note in the table above that the BCD coding is the binary equivalent of the decimal digit. Since many devices use BCD, knowing how to handle this system is important. You must realize that BCD and binary are not the same. For example, 49₁₀ in binary is 110001₂, but 49₁₀ in BCD is 01001001_BCD. Each decimal digit is converted to its binary equivalent. BCD Conversion You can see by the above table, conversion of decimal to BCD or BCD to decimal is similar to the conversion of hexadecimal to binary and vice versa. For example, let’s go through the conversion of 264₁₀ to BCD. We’ll use the block format that you used in earlier conversions. First, write out the decimal number to be converted; then, below each digit write the BCD equivalent of that digit: