The subject of this book is the synthesis of synchronous hardware. The purpose is to provide a firm mathematical foundation for the so-called space-time mapping methods for hardware synthesis that have been proposed during the last few years. Thus the treatment is fairly mathematical. In a space-time mapping method, an algorithm is described as a set of atomic events, with possible data dependencies between them. The task is to find a mapping, assigning a space-time coordinate to each event, so that causality is not violated and the solution is "good." Previous work in the area, if it...