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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: A straight ring counter, also known as a one-hot counter, connects the output of the last shift register to the first shift register input and circulates a single one (or zero) bit around the ring. A twisted ring counter, also called switch-tail ring counter, walking ring counter, Johnson counter, or Möbius counter, connects the complement of the output of the last shift register to the input of the first register and circulates a stream of ones followed by zeros around the ring. 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 in the code. 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.

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