Revista de Engenharia da Computação e Tecnologia da Informação

Logic Scheme for Determining the Number of Leftmost Insignificant Digits in a Bit-Set of Any Length

Dimitar S Tyanev and Yulka P Petkova

Logic Scheme for Determining the Number of Leftmost Insignificant Digits in a Bit-Set of Any Length

The synthesized logic scheme is capable of determining the number of the leftmost insignificant digits of numbers, which are presented in a bit-set of any length. The content of the bitset can be interpreted in different ways – as signed magnitude, one’s complement or two’s complement number and also as fractional binary number. This allows the scheme to be used in devices working both with fixed-point and floating point. The number of leftmost insignificant digits of the number is necessary to implement the next highly productive one-clock left shift. This micro-operation has place in the algorithms of various machine operations performed in the digital processor. The suggested scheme does not depend on the length of the bit-set because of the cascade principle applied. The synthesized building unit solves the same problem and has a minimum length of 3 bits.