The synthesis technology that would become the basis of Optimal Solutions was developed by the company’s founders while working at the General Electric Microelectronics Center.
SOCRATES was a system of programs which automatically synthesized combinational circuits from functional specifications. SOCRATES used Boolean, algebraic and circuit level optimization techniques to synthesize circuits whose size and speed compared well with circuits designed by expert circuit designers.
The original paper was ‘Automatic Generation of Combinatorial Logic from a Functional Specification’, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and systems, 1984, but an electronic version of that cannot be found.
D. Gregory, K. Barlett, A. de Geus, and G. Hachtel. SOCRATES: a system for automatically synthesizing and optimizing combinational logic. In Proc. of the 23rd Design Automation Conference, IEEE Computer Society, 1986.
