Question

Which shifting helps in finding the physical address in 8086?

(a) shifting the segment by 8

(b) shifting the segment by 6

(c) shifting the segment by 4

(d) shifting the segment by 2

The question was posed to me during an interview.

This interesting question is from Memory Organisation of Embedded Systems topic in chapter Memory Systems of Embedded Systems

Answer 1

Correct option is (c) shifting the segment by 4

Easy explanation: The address bus of the 8086 is 20-bit and the data bus is 16-bit in size. So the physical address can be calculated by shifting the segment register by 4 to left and by adding the address bus to it.