Ah, OK... Then disregard the analog multiplexor thing...

The specific company I looked at is Swedish, www.elfa.se, but the part numbers used are generic - look for 4000 or 74xxx series stuff.

I'm fairly sure what you want is a Johnson counter with decoding circuitry, as the basic counter would clock in, and fill up with 1's then start clocking in and fill with 0's - and so on. ie (0000, 1000, 1100, 1110, 1111, 0111, 0011, 0001, 0000...) Decoding the stages allows for singular outputs to each be active for only one specific state.

Look at the attached spec. sheet; you can see the high bit move along the Q0 to Q9 outouts for each clock input. Now, the 4017 is a 10 output counter, but it looks as if you can control the cycle length by feeding back the lowest unused output to the reset pin. In your case with 4 outputs needed (Q0 to Q3) feed back Q4 to reset. The counter will actually raise Q4 high for an instant, but immediately reset back so that Q0 is high instead of Q4.

/Michael