You really need to provide a little bit more information on just what the counter is intended to do and be used for.

If you had intended to just have the ability to count in the memory of the microcontroller up to 6 digits than that is a piece of cake for an 88C52 type microcontroller.

But I highly suspect that you want a bit more.....like maybe you wanted to count some external events or measure frequency of something. Here again the 8052 could accept an input on its interrupt or timer pin and count events. There is an upper limit to how fast of an input you expect to be able to respond to using this method. In general the accumulation rate would be about 1 to 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than the processor crystal frequency. If you need to count 30 MHz then maybe you should be looking at a CPLD design.

I also suspect that you also probably have some goals to display this count. A microcontroller would be excellent for this job, particularly if the count was being accumulated by the same micrrocontroller. By far the easiest display scheme would be to use a character mode LCD module.

Michael Karas