Mining Message Flows from System-on-Chip Execution Traces

Md Rubel Ahmed1, Hao Zheng1, Parijat Mukherjee2, Mahesh C. Ketkar2, Jin Yang2
1University of South Florida, 2Intel


Abstract

Comprehensive and well-defined specifications are necessary to perform rigorous and thorough validation of system-on-chip (SoC)designs. Message flows specify how components of an SoC de-sign communicate and coordinate with each other to realize various system functions. They are essential for efficient system-level validation and debug for SoC designs. However, in practice, such specifications are usually not available, often ambiguous, incomplete, or even contain errors. This paper addresses that problem by proposing a specification mining framework, FlowMiner, that automatically extracts message flows from SoC execution traces. It also includes inference rules and optimization techniques to improve mining performance and reduces mining complexity. Evaluation of this framework in several experiments shows promising results.