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Gray Code
It is the non-weighted code and it is not arithmetic codes. That means there are no specific weights assigned to the bit position. It has a very special feature that, only one bit will change each time the decimal number is incremented as shown in fig. As only one bit changes at a time, the gray code is called as a unit distance code. The gray code is a cyclic code. Gray code cannot be used for arithmetic operation.
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Application of Gray code
Gray code is popularly used in the shaft position encoders.
A shaft position encoder produces a code word which represents the angular position of the shaft.
Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) code
In this code each decimal digit is represented by a 4-bit binary number. BCD is a way to express each of the decimal digits with a binary code. In the BCD, with four bits we can represent sixteen numbers (0000 to 1111). But in BCD code only first ten of these are used (0000 to 1001). The remaining six code combinations i.e. 1010 to 1111 are invalid in BCD.
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Advantages of BCD Codes
It is very similar to decimal system.
We need to remember binary equivalent of decimal numbers 0 to 9 only.
Disadvantages of BCD Codes
The addition and subtraction of BCD have different rules.
The BCD arithmetic is little more complicated.
BCD needs more number of bits than binary to represent the decimal number. So BCD is less efficient than binary.
Alphanumeric codes
A binary digit or bit can represent only two symbols as it has only two states '0' or '1'. But this is not enough for communication between two computers because there we need many more symbols for communication. These symbols are required to represent 26 alphabets with capital and small letters, numbers from 0 to 9, punctuation marks and other symbols.
The alphanumeric codes are the codes that represent numbers and alphabetic characters. Mostly such codes also represent other characters such as symbol and various instructions necessary for conveying information. An alphanumeric code should at least represent 10 digits and 26 letters of alphabet i.e. total 36 items. The following three alphanumeric codes are very commonly used for the data representation.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).
ASCII code is a 7-bit code whereas EBCDIC is an 8-bit code. ASCII code is more commonly used worldwide while EBCDIC is used primarily in large IBM computers.
