Help with 5 bit weight computations

Thread Starter


Joined Nov 11, 2011

First post :)

I am fairly rubbish at Electronics. My preference is power engineering. However I have a coursework to do for digital electronics. My understanding of digital is pretty lame.
Im not looking for answers to the question, I just need help understanding it lol.

Can anyone please point me in the right direction with this? The question is:

"Your task is it to design and test a digital circuit to compute the weight of
a 8-bit input vector. Furthermore, the circuit has to be able to detect the
lowest weight vector, assuming that the 5 input bits cannot all be 0 or 1.
Design and test can either be performed using MatLab or Tina. Beneath the
implementation using logic gates also explain and give the implementation​
using either ROM, PLA or PAL devices"

Any help would be MUCH appretiated


Joined Feb 19, 2009
A binary to decimal converter?

In the context, "Weight" usually means how close to the most significant bit a bit is, but am unclear on if they want you to find what the highest weighted position with a set bit is, or if they want the input converted to decimal.


0b01000011 -> Weight is 6 (bit number 6), or 64 decimal, since bit 7 isn't set, the LSB 11 don't add in. Bits are numbered 0 to 7 starting from the right.
0b01000011 -> is 0x43 hex, or 67 in decimal for straight conversion

If you have had similar questions/lectures where the answers were shown I might understand the context of what they are looking for a bit better. I have no idea where the 5 bit comparison is in the question, though that is the title of the thread...
Last edited:

Thread Starter


Joined Nov 11, 2011
This is exactly the problem. I dont really understand the question :/
And the lecturer really does not help.

I think it means weighting as in how many 1's are included.
Like 1011 has a weighting of 3 or 011 in binary and 0011 has a weighting of 2 or 010.
The only related thing we have done in tutorials is the quine mccluskey method. Ive tried this and got down to an output of f = AB'C' + A'C + A'B
But now im trying to put it into a pal form circuit and have no idea if its correct :S