சுருக்கம்

Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine and Thirty Two Number Systems in Digital Electronics

Dussa Sudha Mohan

Number system is a basis for counting various items. On hearing the word “number”, all of us immediately think of the familiar decimal number system with its ‘10’ digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. Modern computers communicate and operate with binary numbers (combination of 0’s and 1’s). Let us consider decimal number ‘08’. This number is represented in binary as ‘1000’. In the example, if decimal number is considered, we require only ‘two digits’ to represent the number, whereas if binary number is considered we required ‘four digits. Therefore, we can say that, when decimal numbers are represented in the binary form, they take more digits. For large decimal numbers peoples have to deal with very large binary strings and therefore, they do not like working with binary numbers. This fact gave rise to three number systems: Octal, Hexadecimal and Binary Coded Decimal (BCD). These number systems represent binary numbers in a compressed form. Therefore, these systems are now widely used to compress large strings of binary numbers. In this article, I introduce the new number systems such as three, four and five, six, seven, nine and thirty-two number systems.