TicTacBench: Benchmarking Timing Closure Capabilities of Coding Agents
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of coding agents capable of performing complex engineering tasks, including register-transfer level (RTL) design and optimization. Existing RTL benchmarks mainly evaluate functional correctness and performance, power, and area (PPA) of the generated RTL designs, leaving agents' ability for \emph{timing closure} under-evaluated. We propose TicTacBench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate coding agents' capabilities for RTL-level timing closure under post-place-and-route (post-PnR) evaluation. TicTacBench contains 30 diverse tasks, each provided with a suboptimal RTL design, realistic timing constraints, functional equivalence verification, and timing reports. With over 300 runs of coding agents driven by 8 frontier LLMs, we find that even the best agent can only close 53.3\% of tasks with 7.18\% area-delay product (ADP) degradation and 8.83\% energy-delay-squared product (EDDP) improvement on average. We identify common failure categories that explain why agents fail to close timing. Then we propose TicTacSkill, a new method that guides agents to follow standard timing-closure procedures and improves the Timing Closure Rate by 9\%. These results suggest that while coding agents have made significant progress in RTL design, their timing-closure capability still has substantial room for improvement.