The Binary Number System

Digital Electronic devices and circuit operate in one of the two states which can be ON or OFF. For this reason the binary number system is used to describe their operation. The base or radix of the binary number system is 2 and has only two symbols. These symbols are 0 and 1. To make a large binary number many 0s and 1s are grouped together The location of a symbol in a binary system is called a bit. The bit location in binary number system also has weight like the decimal number system which was explain in the first tutorial Number Systems and Codes. But here the weight are expressed as the binary base 2 raise to a +ve or -ve experiment. In binary system, the leftmost bit is called the Most Significant Bit (MSB) while the Right Most Bit is called the Least Significant Bit (LSB).

For instance in a binary number 1101.001, the MSB has a value of 1 and weight of 2³ (or 8) while the LSB is also 1 with a weight of 2^-3 (i.e ¹/₈)

THE NEXT TUTORIAL IS THE BINARY TO DECIMAL CONVERSION

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