Modern embedded systems require high performance, low cost and low power consumption. Such systems typically consist of a heterogeneous collection of processors, specialized memory subsystems, and partially programmable or fixed-function components. This heterogeneity, coupled with issues such as hardware/software partitioning, mapping, scheduling, etc., leads to a large number of design possibilities, making performance debugging and validation of such systems a difficult problem.

Embedded systems are used to control safety critical applications such as flight control, automotive electronics and healthcare monitoring. Clearly, developing reliable software/systems for such applications is of utmost importance. This book describes a host of debugging and verification methods which can help to achieve this goal.
Covers the major abstraction levels of embedded systems design, starting from software analysis and micro-architectural modeling, to modeling of resource sharing and communication at the system levelIntegrates formal techniques of validation for hardware/software with debugging and validation of embedded system design flowsIncludes practical case studies to answer the questions: does a design meet its requirements, if not, then which parts of the system are responsible for the violation, and once they are identified, then how should the design be suitably modified?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2012 held in Bangalore, India, in September 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of three keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers cover various topics related to both theoretical aspects of computing and the exploitation of theory through methods and tools for system development.