CD4040 12-Stage Ripple Carry Binary Counter IC (DIP-16 Package)

Counting clock pulses in software is easy enough for a microcontroller, but a project built around discrete logic instead often needs that same counting done in hardware, and the CD4040 handles exactly that. Its 12 cascaded stages each divide the previous stage's output by two, giving a design access to divided-down clock frequencies all the way out to 1/4096th of the input, useful for frequency division, timing circuits, or sequencing logic built without a microcontroller in the loop.