This book emerged from lecture notes of a course taught in the second year to students of Computer Science at the Federal Institute of Tech nology, Zurich. The topic of hardware design plays a relatively minor role in Compu ter Science curricula at many universities. Most courses concentrate on the various aspects of theory, software, and of information sys tems. Students therefore obtain few opportunities to deal with con crete engineering problems and physical devices. We consider this as rather unfortunate, particularly for technical universities. As a result, we observe a growing gap...