Answer to Question #242800 in Electrical Engineering for P Kushal

Question

Design a circuit that would be able to shift bits but also store them for a duration of time

Answer 1

C is a powerful language and allows programmer many

operations for bit manipulation. Data can be accessed at

the bit level to make operations and storage more

efficient. As you will see, bit operations can be used to

do many things including setting flags, encrypting and

decrypting images as we will implement in one of the lab

assignments. Bit operations can also be used to efficiently

pack data into a more compressed form. For example, an

entire array of 16 boolean values can be represented by

just 2 bytes of data or an IP address such as 192.168.1.15

can be packed into 32 bits of storage. This can come very

handy in cases where data needs to be transmitted through a

limited bandwidth network or in cases where we simply need

to store data more efficiently for better memory management

in the application. For example, when programming mobile

devices with limited memory, you may want to work at the

bit level to make things more efficient and save memory.

Also understanding bit operations can be useful in writing

device drivers and many other low level applications. First

we will discuss the bit shift operations.