Mining Message Flows from System-on-Chip Execution Traces

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 design communicate and coordinate with each other to realize various system functions. Message flow specifications 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, which, unlike software traces, show a high degree of concurrency. A set of inference rules and optimization techniques are presented to improve mining performance and reduce mining complexity. Evaluation of this framework in several experiments shows promising results.