Tsutomu Sasao Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan The material covered in this book is quite unique especially for p- ple who are reading English, since such material is quite hard to ?nd in the U.S. literature. German and Russian people have independently developed their theories, but such work is not well known in the U.S. societies. On the other hand, the theories developed in the U.S. are not conveyed to the other places. Thus, the same theory is re-invented or re-discovered in various places. For example, the switching theory was developed independently in the U.S., Europe, and Japan,...

In today's world, people are using more and more digital systems in daily life. Such systems utilize the elementariness of Boolean values. A Boolean variable can carry only two different Boolean values: FALSE or TRUE (0 or 1), and has the best interference resistance in technical systems. However, a Boolean function exponentially depends on the number of its variables. This exponential complexity is the cause of major problems in the process of design and realization of circuits. According to Moore's Law, the complexity of digital systems approximately doubles every 18 month. This requires...