About

A digital circuit that literally "counts" - it progresses through a sequence of states that are representative of some value. It need not count in a natural progression i.e. 1,2,3,4,5 etc. to be considered a counter (i.e. you can have different count sequences) each count value need not be of significance to other circuits (i.e. sometime it's sufficient that the counter counts to some value and then stops). Examples are Gray code, up/down counter.