Communication: A Number Representation Convertor for Magnetic Bubble String Comparators

Conventionally, there are four common ways to represent negative numbers, namely, 1's-complement, 2's-complement, signed-magnitude, and excess-2m-1. In all these representations except the last one (excess-2m-1), 1 is used as the sign bit to denote negative numbers. However, in a recently reported magnetic bubble device, using 1 as the sign bit for negative numbers may cause problems when two numbers are compared. In this paper we define a new number representation (called Bl's-complement), and we propose a simple, read-free device for converting numbers represented in any of the above standard representations to either the excess-2m-1 or the Bl's-complement representation.