12.

Boolean Operations

To understand how individual bits are stored and manipulated inside a computer, it is convenient to
imagine that the bit 0 represents the value false and the bit 1 represents the value true. Operations
that manipulate true/false values are called

Boolean operations, in honor of the mathematician George Boole (1815–1864), who was a pioneer
in the field of mathematics called logic. Three of the basic Boolean operations are AND, OR, and
XOR (exclusive or). The “AND” operation and “OR” are summarized in the Figure 15.

1. AND Boolean Operation

It produces the output as 1 when both of the inputs are 1. Otherwise, it gives output as 0 as shown in
the Figure 15. 

1. OR Boolean Operation

It produces output of 1 when any of the inputs are 1, otherwise 0 as shown in the Figure 15.

1. XOR Boolean Operation

XOR (Exclusive or) is another Boolean operation which produces the output of 1 when both inputs
are different. It produces 0 when both inputs are same as shown in the Figure 16.

1. Not Operation 

Not operation takes one input, produces 1 when input is 0 and produces 0, when the input is 1 as
shown in the Figure 16. 

Boolean Operation Example

To demonstrate the working of the Boolean operations, an example has been shown in the Table 6.
First two rows represent the bit patterns as “A” and “B” and next rows are self-explanatory to
perform “AND”, “OR”, “XOR”, “Not” on both “A” and “B”.   

Table 6: Example of Boolean operation