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.

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?

Multi-core architectures have recently gained in popularity due to their high-performance and low-power characteristics. Most modern desktop systems are now equipped with multi-core processors. Despite the wide-spread adaptation of multi-core processors in desktop systems, using such processors in embedded systems still poses several challenges. Real-time, embedded systems often need to satisfy several extra-functional constraints, such as timing. In particular, for hard real-time systems, such timing constraints are strictly enforced. Violation of these timing constraints may have serious consequences, potentially costing human lives. Therefore, static timing-analysis of hard real-time systems has emerged as a critical problem to solve. This monograph first discusses the challenges imposed by multi-core architectures in designing time-predictable embedded systems. It goes on to describe, in detail, a comprehensive solution to guarantee time-predictable execution on multi-core platforms. It also discusses various techniques and surveys the state-of-the-art in terms of available solutions. Throughout the text, the aim is to provide a solid background on recent trends in research towards achieving time-predictability on multi-cores. It also highlights the limitations of the state-of-the-art and discusses future research opportunities and challenges to accomplish time-predictable execution on multi-core platforms. The monograph is an ideal reference for embedded systems designers and researchers interested in having a foundation for building time-predictable software on multi-core platforms. It will also help the research community to address the existing challenges in this area.