Bridging Layout and RTL: Knowledge Distillation Based Timing Prediction

Abstract

Accurate and efficient timing prediction at the register-transfer level (RTL) remains a fundamental challenge in electronic design automation (EDA), particularly in striking a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. While static timing analysis (STA) provides high-fidelity results through comprehensive physical parameters, its computational overhead makes it impractical for rapid design iterations. Conversely, existing RTL-level approaches sacrifice accuracy due to the limited physical information available. We propose RTLDistil, a novel cross-stage knowledge distillation framework that bridges this gap by transferring precise physical characteristics from a layout-aware teacher model (Teacher GNN) to an efficient RTL-level student model (Student GNN), both implemented as graph neural networks (GNNs). RTLDistil efficiently predicts key timing metrics, such as arrival time (AT), and employs a multi-granularity distillation strategy that captures timing-critical features at node, subgraph, and global levels. Experimental results demonstrate that RTLDistil achieves significant improvement in RTL-level timing prediction error reduction, compared to state-of-the-art prediction models. This framework enables accurate early-stage timing prediction, advancing EDA’s “left-shift” paradigm while maintaining computational efficiency. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/sklp-eda-lab/RTLDistil.