Symbolic debugging of embedded hardware and software

Symbolic debuggers are system-development tools that can accelerate the validation speed of behavioral specifications by allowing a user to interact with an executing code at the source level. In response to a user query, the debugger must retrieve and display the value of a source variable in a manner consistent with user expectations with respect to the source statement where execution has halted. However, when a behavioral specification has been optimized using transformations, values of variables may either be inaccessible in the runtime state or inconsistent with user expectations. We address the problem that pertains to the retrieval of source values for the globally optimized behavioral specifications. We present a new approach for symbolic debugging. The implementation of the new debugging approach poses several optimization tasks. We formulate the optimization tasks and develop heuristics to solve them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a set of designs.