Information About Counter

In digital logic and computing, a counter is a device which stores (and sometimes displays) the number of times a particular event or process has occurred, often in relationship to a clock signal.   Types Of Counter

Electronic counters

In electronics, counters can be implemented quite easily using register-type circuits such as the flip-flop, and a wide variety of classifications exist:

• Asynchronous (ripple) counter – changing state bits are used as clocks to subsequent state flip-flops
• Synchronous counter – all state bits change under control of a single clock
• Decade counter – counts through ten states per stage
• Up/down counter – counts both up and down, under command of a control input
• Ring counter – formed by a shift register with feedback connection in a ring
• Johnson counter – a twisted ring counter
• Cascaded counter

Asynchronous (ripple) counter

An asynchronous (ripple) counter is a single JK-type flip-flop, with its J (data) input fed from its own inverted output. This circuit can store one bit, and hence can count from zero to one before it overflows (starts over from 0).

Synchronous counter

A simple way of implementing the logic for each bit of an ascending counter (which is what is depicted in the image to the right) is for each bit to toggle when all of the less significant bits are at a logic high state.

Decade counter

A decade counter is one that counts in decimal digits, rather than binary

Up/down counter

A counter that can change state in either direction, under the control of an up/down selector input, is known as an up/down counter. When the selector is in the up state, the counter increments its value. When the selector is in the down state, the counter decrements the count.

Ring counter

A ring counter is a circular shift register which is initiated such that only one of its flip-flops is the state one while others are in their zero states.

Computer science counters

In computability theory, a counter is considered a type of memory. A counter stores a single natural number (initially zero) and can be arbitrarily many digits long. A counter is usually considered in conjunction with a finite-state machine (FSM), which can perform the following operations on the counter:

• Check whether the counter is zero
• Increment the counter by one.
• Decrement the counter by one (if it's already zero, this leaves it unchanged).