In this paper we have defined a novel activation function called the multi-level signum for the real and complex valued associative memories. The major motivation of such a function is to increase the number of patterns that can be stored in a memory without increasing the number of neurons. The state of such a network can be described as one of the points that lie on a complex bounded lattice. The convergence behavior of such a network is observed which is supported with the simulation results performed on a sample dataset of 1000 instances