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One-hot Encoding

Designing a FSM is the most common and challenging task for every digital logic designer. One of the key factors for optimizing a FSM design is the choice of state coding, which influences the complexity of the logic functions, the hardware costs of the circuits, timing issues, power usage, etc. There are several options like binary encoding, gray encoding, one-hot encoding, etc. The choice of the designer depends on the factors like technology, design specifications, etc.

One-hot encoding

In one-hot encoding only one bit of the state vector is asserted for any given state. All other state bits are zero. Thus if there are n states then n state flip-flops are required. As only one bit remains logic high and rest are logic low, it is called as One-hot encoding.
Example: If there is a FSM, which has 5 states. Then 5 flip-flops are required to implement the FSM using one-hot encoding. The states will have the following values:
S0 - 10000
S1 - 01000
S2 - 00100
S3 - 00010
S4 - 00001

Advantages
  • State decoding is simplified, since the state bits themselves can be used directly to check whether the FSM is in a particular state or not. Hence additional logic is not required for decoding, this is extremely advantageous when implementing a big FSM.
  • Low switching activity, hence resulting low power consumption, and less prone to glitches.
  • Modifying a design is easier. Adding or deleting a state and changing state transition equations (combinational logic present in FSM) can be done without affecting the rest of the design.
  • Faster than other encoding techniques. Speed is independent of number of states, and depends only on the number of transitions into a particular state.
  • Finding the critical path of the design is easier (static timing analysis).
  • One-hot encoding is particularly advantageous for FPGA implementations. If a big FSM design is implemented using FPGA, regular encoding like binary, gray, etc will use fewer flops for the state vector than one-hot encoding, but additional logic blocks will be required to encode and decode the state. But in FPGA each logic block contains one or more flip-flops (click here to know why?) hence due to presence of encoding and decoding more logics block will be used by regular encoding FSM than one-hot encoding FSM.
Disadvantages
  • The only disadvantage of using one-hot encoding is that it required more flip-flops than the other techniques like binary, gray, etc. The number of flip-flops required grows linearly with number of states. Example: If there is a FSM with 38 states. One-hot encoding requires 38 flip-flops where as other require 6 flip-flops only.
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