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Codiode/Problems/Combinational Logic

Sign-Magnitude Representation

EasyLogic CircuitAnalyze

Early computing architectures used sign-magnitude representation for signed integers before adopting two's complement for its arithmetic efficiency.

The system uses an 8-bit sign-magnitude encoding. The most significant bit (MSB) acts as the sign flag, where 0 is positive and 1 is negative. The remaining 7 bits represent the absolute magnitude of the number.

Determine the 8-bit binary representations for +3 and -3. Evaluate the hardware outcome if these two binary patterns are fed directly into a standard unsigned binary adder.

Constraints

  • The system strictly uses 8-bit words.
  • The standard binary adder performs pure unsigned binary addition with no awareness of sign flags.

Topics

arithmeticbinaryencoding

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