Advances in debugging high performance embedded systems

The development of application software has quickly become the most expensive and people-intensive area of systems design. Depending on the nature of the software and with the advent of software quality controls, it has been estimated that each line of code can cost upwards of $50 to develop and debug (this rationale appears to hold true for both assembly language and high level language based algorithms). This being the case, it should be no surprise that debugging techniques have been subject to much rethinking recently and that debugging aids and systems are now being implemented in embedded controllers.