BCD
Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) takes advantage of the fact that any one decimal numeral can be represented by a four-bit pattern. The most obvious way of encoding digits is Natural BCD (NBCD), where each decimal digit is represented by its corresponding four-bit binary value, as shown in the following table. This is also called "8421" encoding.
| Decimal digit | BCD | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 | |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 7 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |