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Ring counter
A ring counter is a type of counter composed of flip-flops connected into a shift register, with the output of the last flip-flop fed to the input of the first, making a "circular" or "ring" structure.
There are two types of ring counters:
Ring counters are often used in hardware design (e.g. ASIC and FPGA design) to create finite-state machines. A binary counter would require an adder circuit which is substantially more complex than a ring counter and has higher propagation delay as the number of bits increases, whereas the propagation delay of a ring counter will be nearly constant regardless of the number of bits.
The straight and twisted forms have different properties, and relative advantages and disadvantages.
A general disadvantage of ring counters is that they are lower density codes than normal binary encodings of state numbers. A binary counter can represent 2N states, where N is the number of bits in the code, whereas a straight ring counter can represent only N states and a Johnson counter can represent only 2N states. This may be an important consideration in hardware implementations where registers are more expensive than combinational logic.
Johnson counters are sometimes favored, because they offer twice as many count states from the same number of shift registers, and because they are able to self-initialize from the all-zeros state, without requiring the first count bit to be injected externally at start-up. The Johnson counter generates a code in which adjacent states differ by only one bit (that is, have a Hamming distance of 1), as in a Gray code, which can be useful if the bit pattern is going to be asynchronously sampled.
When a fully decoded or one-hot representation of the counter state is needed, as in some sequence controllers, the straight ring counter is preferred. The one-hot property means that the set of codes are separated by a minimum Hamming distance of 2, so any single-bit error is detectable (as is any error pattern other than turning on one bit and turning off one bit).
Sometimes bidirectional shift registers are used (using multiplexors to take the input for each flip-flop from its left or right neighbor), so that bidirectional or up–down ring counters can be made.
Hub AI
Ring counter AI simulator
(@Ring counter_simulator)
Ring counter
A ring counter is a type of counter composed of flip-flops connected into a shift register, with the output of the last flip-flop fed to the input of the first, making a "circular" or "ring" structure.
There are two types of ring counters:
Ring counters are often used in hardware design (e.g. ASIC and FPGA design) to create finite-state machines. A binary counter would require an adder circuit which is substantially more complex than a ring counter and has higher propagation delay as the number of bits increases, whereas the propagation delay of a ring counter will be nearly constant regardless of the number of bits.
The straight and twisted forms have different properties, and relative advantages and disadvantages.
A general disadvantage of ring counters is that they are lower density codes than normal binary encodings of state numbers. A binary counter can represent 2N states, where N is the number of bits in the code, whereas a straight ring counter can represent only N states and a Johnson counter can represent only 2N states. This may be an important consideration in hardware implementations where registers are more expensive than combinational logic.
Johnson counters are sometimes favored, because they offer twice as many count states from the same number of shift registers, and because they are able to self-initialize from the all-zeros state, without requiring the first count bit to be injected externally at start-up. The Johnson counter generates a code in which adjacent states differ by only one bit (that is, have a Hamming distance of 1), as in a Gray code, which can be useful if the bit pattern is going to be asynchronously sampled.
When a fully decoded or one-hot representation of the counter state is needed, as in some sequence controllers, the straight ring counter is preferred. The one-hot property means that the set of codes are separated by a minimum Hamming distance of 2, so any single-bit error is detectable (as is any error pattern other than turning on one bit and turning off one bit).
Sometimes bidirectional shift registers are used (using multiplexors to take the input for each flip-flop from its left or right neighbor), so that bidirectional or up–down ring counters can be made.