For example, represent the value -0.5 as a twos complement floating point number with an eight bit mantissa and a four bit exponent.

The twos complement of -0.5 is 1.1.

To make this into a normalised floating point number we need to carry out a single binary left shift.

Mantissa: 0.1000000

Exponent: 1111

This gives an exponent value of -1 and a mantissa value of 0.5.

-1 x 2-1 = -0.5

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