  In this paper, we study seven well-known trace analysis techniques both from
the hardware and software domain and discuss their performance on
communication-centric system-on-chip (SoC) traces. SoC traces are usually huge
in size and concurrent in nature, therefore mining SoC traces poses additional
challenges. We provide a hands-on discussion of the selected tools/algorithms
in terms of the input, output, and analysis methods they employ. Hardware
traces also varies in nature when observed in different level, this work can
help developers/academicians to pick up the right techniques for their work. We
take advantage of a synthetic trace generator to find the interestingness of
the mined outcomes for each tool as well as we work with a realistic GEM5 set
up to find the performance of these tools on more realistic SoC traces.
Comprehensive analysis of the tool's performance and a benchmark trace dataset
are also presented.
