Byte

Byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunication. It is an ordered collection of bits in which each bits denoted the binary value of 1 and 0. A byte was a number of bits used to encode a single character or text in computer, and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer  architecture. The size of byte is hardware dependent ,but the modern one is eight bits, and this is the convenient power of two.

Many type of application use variable representation in eight or fewer bits, and processor designer will optimize for this common usage. The byte size and byte addressing are often use in place of longer integer for size or speed optimization in  microcontroller and CPU. Floating point processor and signal processing application tend to operate in a larger value and some digital signal processor have 16 to 40 bits as the smallest unit of addressable storage. One such processor a byte may be defined to contain this number of bits. The term octet was defined to explicitly denoted a sequence of 8 bit because the ambiguity associated with the term byte. It is widely used in communication protocol specification.

The byte can also be defined as data type in certain programming language. C++ for example defined byte as an addressable unit of data large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment. The C standard require the char integral data type is capable of holding at least 255 different value and is represented by t least 8 bits. The actual number of bits in a particular implementation  is documented as CHAR_BITS . JAVA primitive data type is always defined as consisting of 8 bits and being a signed data type. In data transmission system, a contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modern or satellite communication which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes may include start bits, stop bits or parity bits, and could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code