I'm not entirely sure if it was quite so heavily software synthesized at that point. I think a lot of the logic and datapath was still done by hand.
The grad student I think you're talking about is (now) Dr. Carl Sechen who developed an Auto Place and Route tool he named Timberwolf. Those tools don't synthesize logic so much as they choose optimal locations and orientations for the standard cells on the wafer and then attempt to route the metal interconnects (all with respect to timing). I think it wound up being rather buggy (to the point they had to keep calling him back from school work to patch some things up) and a fair number of things had to be corrected by hand.
I did hear that some of the units on the 386 were written in some Stanford devised programming language from the pre Verilog/VHDL toolstack days and that a few engineers in design automate hacked up a tool flow to turn that programming language into something synthesizable.
That said I wasn't there and so I can't claim to know for sure. I would wager there are some good interviews and documents either with the Intel Museum folks or the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (which seems to always have both contacts from the day and documents for all the old fun computing hardware).
The grad student I think you're talking about is (now) Dr. Carl Sechen who developed an Auto Place and Route tool he named Timberwolf. Those tools don't synthesize logic so much as they choose optimal locations and orientations for the standard cells on the wafer and then attempt to route the metal interconnects (all with respect to timing). I think it wound up being rather buggy (to the point they had to keep calling him back from school work to patch some things up) and a fair number of things had to be corrected by hand.
I did hear that some of the units on the 386 were written in some Stanford devised programming language from the pre Verilog/VHDL toolstack days and that a few engineers in design automate hacked up a tool flow to turn that programming language into something synthesizable.
That said I wasn't there and so I can't claim to know for sure. I would wager there are some good interviews and documents either with the Intel Museum folks or the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (which seems to always have both contacts from the day and documents for all the old fun computing hardware).