ScaleRTL: Scaling LLMs with Reasoning Data and Test-Time Compute for Accurate RTL Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Deng, Chenhui, Tsai, Yun-Da, Liu, Guan-Ting, Yu, Zhongzhi, Ren, Haoxing
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Deng, Chenhui
Tsai, Yun-Da
Liu, Guan-Ting
Yu, Zhongzhi
Ren, Haoxing
author_facet Deng, Chenhui
Tsai, Yun-Da
Liu, Guan-Ting
Yu, Zhongzhi
Ren, Haoxing
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled near-human performance on software coding benchmarks, but their effectiveness in RTL code generation remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality training data. While prior efforts have fine-tuned LLMs for RTL tasks, they do not fundamentally overcome the data bottleneck and lack support for test-time scaling due to their non-reasoning nature. In this work, we introduce ScaleRTL, the first reasoning LLM for RTL coding that scales up both high-quality reasoning data and test-time compute. Specifically, we curate a diverse set of long chain-of-thought reasoning traces averaging 56K tokens each, resulting in a dataset of 3.5B tokens that captures rich RTL knowledge. Fine-tuning a general-purpose reasoning model on this corpus yields ScaleRTL that is capable of deep RTL reasoning. Subsequently, we further enhance the performance of ScaleRTL through a novel test-time scaling strategy that extends the reasoning process via iteratively reflecting on and self-correcting previous reasoning steps. Experimental results show that ScaleRTL achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerilogEval and RTLLM, outperforming 18 competitive baselines by up to 18.4% on VerilogEval and 12.7% on RTLLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ScaleRTL: Scaling LLMs with Reasoning Data and Test-Time Compute for Accurate RTL Code Generation
Deng, Chenhui
Tsai, Yun-Da
Liu, Guan-Ting
Yu, Zhongzhi
Ren, Haoxing
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled near-human performance on software coding benchmarks, but their effectiveness in RTL code generation remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality training data. While prior efforts have fine-tuned LLMs for RTL tasks, they do not fundamentally overcome the data bottleneck and lack support for test-time scaling due to their non-reasoning nature. In this work, we introduce ScaleRTL, the first reasoning LLM for RTL coding that scales up both high-quality reasoning data and test-time compute. Specifically, we curate a diverse set of long chain-of-thought reasoning traces averaging 56K tokens each, resulting in a dataset of 3.5B tokens that captures rich RTL knowledge. Fine-tuning a general-purpose reasoning model on this corpus yields ScaleRTL that is capable of deep RTL reasoning. Subsequently, we further enhance the performance of ScaleRTL through a novel test-time scaling strategy that extends the reasoning process via iteratively reflecting on and self-correcting previous reasoning steps. Experimental results show that ScaleRTL achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerilogEval and RTLLM, outperforming 18 competitive baselines by up to 18.4% on VerilogEval and 12.7% on RTLLM.
title ScaleRTL: Scaling LLMs with Reasoning Data and Test-Time Compute for Accurate RTL Code Generation
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05566