Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Design Recommendations

ID 683082
Date 9/26/2022
Public

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2.2.3.3. Avoid Ripple Counters

To simplify verification, avoid ripple counters in your design. In the past, FPGA designers implemented ripple counters to divide clocks by a power of two because the counters are easy to design and may use fewer gates than their synchronous counterparts.

Ripple counters use cascaded registers, in which the output pin of one register feeds the clock pin of the register in the next stage. This cascading can cause problems because the counter creates a ripple clock at each stage. These ripple clocks must be handled properly during timing analysis, which can be difficult and may require you to make complicated timing assignments in your synthesis and placement and routing tools.

You can often use ripple clock structures to make ripple counters out of the smallest amount of logic possible. However, in all Intel devices supported by the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, using a ripple clock structure to reduce the amount of logic used for a counter is unnecessary because the device allows you to construct a counter using one logic element per counter bit. You should avoid using ripple counters completely.