The opportunities created by modern microelectronic technology cannot be effectively and efficiently exploited, because of weaknesses of the traditional circuit synthesis methods used in today?s CAD tools. In this paper, a new information-driven circuit synthesis method is discussed that targets combinational circuits implemented with gates from the pre-characterized gate libraries. The method is based on our original information-driven approach to circuit synthesis, bottom-up general decomposition and theory of information relationship measures. It differs considerably from all other known methods. The experimental results from the automatic circuit synthesis tool that implements the method demonstrate that the information-driven general decomposition produces very fast and compact gate-based circuits.