Question

Identify the correct combinational circuit in the following analogy. Due to road construction, four lanes may be reduced to a single lane. A policeman selects which one lane currently passes through by blocking the other lanes. Please tell me which circuit was used.

Answer 1

Multiplexer(MUX) is the combinational circuit that should be used here. A multiplexer also known as data selector as its name suggests is a combinational circuit that selects binary information from one of many input lines and directs it to a single output line. A MUX having 2^n input lines has n select lines which select one of the inputs and forward it to the output line. In this problem, the four lanes mentioned are the inputs to the MUX and the one selected by the policeman is the selected input line. So a 4:1 MUX can be used here.