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 optimizes logic using boolean and algebraic minimization techniques, and it optimizes circuits derived from this logic in a user defined technology with a rule based expert system. This paper discusses the goals of logic synthesis 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.