TASTE: An open-source tool-chain for embedded system and software development

This paper presents the results of the past two years of continuous development of the TASTE tool-set. TASTE is a development environment dedicated to embedded, real-time systems and was created under the initiative of the European Space Agency back in 2008, after the completion of a FP6 project called ASSERT. TASTE is free and open source, and is currently used to design small to medium-size systems; it relies on two powerful and complementary modeling languages: ASN.1 and AADL, and comes together with a solid engineering approach. TASTE brings ideas on how a system can be optimally built, by taking and putting together components of heterogeneous nature, and making sure that they run according to their specification and without software hacking introduced during the development. The latest TASTE improvements include several major features such as the integration of VHDL components, the recording/replay of runtime scenarii using message sequence charts, the support of legacy encoding protocols, means to inspect and patch data at runtime, and the generation of systems for additional platforms such as RT Linux (Xenomai). Our graphical front-ends have also been redesigned to offer a better user experience.