-Hardware counters are registers that have a special purpose, they

were designed to be put together as microprocessors.

-A ripple counter is a type of asynchronous circuit that stores and

increments the number of occurrences of an event
Count Up:

Count Down:

Common Clock Count Up:

It is important to make sure that the illegal state isn’t reached by the
counter because smooth operation requires to errors and incompatible
states.