Binary Worksheet 5 – Floating point

Name: __________________________

For this worksheet, reals will be represented as 8-bit words, using the following structure…

8-bit word: 1 bit for the sign of the mantissa

3 bits for the two’s complement exponent
4 bits for the normalized mantissa

eg. 0 011 1100 sign => +

exponent = +011 => +3
mantissa = 0.1100 => 0.75
decimal number = 0.75 x 23 = 0.75 x 8 = 6

1. Determine the decimal value of the following numbers:

a. 1 011 1001 sign =
exponent =
mantissa =
decimal value =

b. 0 101 1110 sign =

exponent =
mantissa =
decimal value =

c. 0 000 1010 sign =

exponent =
mantissa =
decimal value =

Page 1 of 2
2. Convert the following numbers to floating point representation, using the 8-bit word as
specified above).
eg. 6.5
6.5 x 20 convert to m x be format
0110.1 x 20 convert the mantissa to binary
0.1101 x 22 normalise the mantissa
0.1101 x 2010 convert the exponent to binary (in 2’s complement if necessary)
0 010 1101 format the components (into a 9-bit word in this case)

a) 3.75 b) - 0.0625

c) 1.5 d) - 0.6

3. While floating point allows a large range of numbers to be represented, what is the main
problem with floating point representation?

Page 2 of 2