This book is about the design of asynchronous VLSI circuits based on a programming and
compilation approach. It introduces handshake circuits as an intermediate architecture between
the algorithmic programming language Tangram and VLSI circuits.
The work presented in this book grew out of the project "VLSI programming and compilation
into asynchronous circuits" being conducted at Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven,
since 1986. Our original motivation was to increase the productivity of VLSI design by treating
circuit design as a programming activity. We chose asynchronous circuits as target for
automatic silicon compilation, because asynchronous circuits simplified the translation process
and made it easier to take advantage from the abundantly available parallelism in VLSI. Later
we discovered that the potential for low power consumption inherent in asynchronous circuits
may turn out to be highly relevant to battery-powered products.