The Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) has been proposed for construction contiguous to the TFTR facility at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. A national design team comprising U.S. fusion laboratories and industry has been organized to design the CIT tokamak. The mission of the CIT Project is to determine the physical behavior of self-heated fusion plasmas, and demonstrate the production of substantial amounts of fusion power. Compact, high-field tokamaks, such as CIT, are ideally suited to study burning plasmas. The basic characteristics of high-field, burning plasmas in general and the CIT device in particular, are high performance derived from high plasma current and high magnetic field, moderate pulse length (10 sec) and lower duty factor.