PipeRTL: Timing-Aware Pipeline Optimization at IR-Level for RTL Generation

TL;DR

PipeRTL introduces an IR-level pipeline optimization framework that enhances RTL generation by explicitly modeling register relocation and timing, leading to improved hardware design quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel IR-level pipeline optimization method using a learned timing predictor and min-cost flow formulation, improving downstream hardware implementation.

Findings

Reduces critical-path delay, power, and area in open-source designs.

Provides a stronger starting point for backend retiming.

Improves downstream implementation quality on average.

Abstract

Modern hardware compilers increasingly rely on rich intermediate representations (IRs) to preserve optimization-relevant semantics before generating RTL code. However, one important optimization is still largely deferred to backend tools: pipeline optimization. In common RTL flows, registers are inserted by frontend heuristics or hardware designers and later adjusted by backend retiming after the design has been lowered to a much lower-level netlist representation. At that point, much of the operator-level structure originally exposed by the compiler IR has already been weakened or lost, limiting opportunities for global, compiler-level pipeline optimization. This paper presents PipeRTL, an IR-level pipeline optimization framework for hardware compilers, instantiated in CIRCT. PipeRTL makes the legality of register relocation explicit in the IR, uses a learned timing predictor to approximate downstream delay behavior, and formulates timing-aware register relocation as a global min-cost flow problem under timing constraints. Evaluation on open-source designs under a commercial backend synthesis flow shows that PipeRTL improves downstream implementation quality on average, reducing critical-path delay, power, and area across the evaluated benchmarks, while also providing a stronger starting point for backend retiming. These results indicate that exposing pipeline optimization as an explicit compiler pass can deliver backend-meaningful gains by improving the sequential structure presented to later stages and the resulting downstream implementation quality.