SOCRATES: A System for Automatically Synthesizing and Optimizing Combinational Logic

This paper presents SOCRATES, a system of programs which Synthesize and optimize combinational logic circuits, from boolean equations. SOCRATES op-timizes logic using boolean and algebraic minimization techniques, and it optimizes circuits derived from this logic in a user defined technology with a rule based ex-pert system. This paper discusses the goals of logic syn-thesis and the capabilities needed in a tool to meet these goals. SOCRATES’s capabilities are then presented and demonstrated with experiments run on circuits from the 1986 Design Automation Conference synthesis benchmark set