Castle Technology Limited, named after

Framlingham Castle Framlingham Castle is a castle in the market town of Framlingham in Suffolk in England. An early motte and bailey or ringwork Norman castle was built on the Framlingham site by 1148, but this was destroyed (slighted) by Henry II of England in t ...

, was a British computer company based in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. It began as a producer of ARM computers and manufactured the

Acorn The acorn, or oaknut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera '' Quercus'' and ''Lithocarpus'', in the family Fagaceae). It usually contains one seed (occasionally two seeds), enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and bo ...

-branded range of desktop computers that run

RISC OS RISC OS is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archi ...

. Following the break-up of

in 1998, Castle Technology bought the rights to continue production of the

RISC PC The Risc PC is Acorn Computers's RISC OS/ Acorn RISC Machine computer, launched on 15 April 1994, which superseded the Acorn Archimedes. The Acorn PC card and software allows PC compatible software to be run. Like the Archimedes, the Risc P ...

and A7000+ computers under the Acorn

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create a ...

. Castle Technology later released the Iyonix PC in November 2002, the first

desktop computer A desktop computer (often abbreviated desktop) is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply ...

to use the

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

XScale

microarchitecture In computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular processor. A given ISA may be imp ...

and then bought the rights to the

Technology from Pace in July 2003.

History

After Acorn withdrew from the

industry in 1998, Castle Technology acquired the rights to produce the A7000, A7000+ and

using the ''Acorn'' brand. In 2001, development started on the Iyonix PC (codenamed ''Tungsten'') as a set-top unit (STU) in secret by engineers at Pace's Shipley campus along with a

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calcula ...

version of RISC OS 4 (known as RISC OS 5). When management discovered the project the campus was closed. Castle Technology acquired the proposed designs and the original engineers from Pace to further develop the Tungsten into a

. Robert Sprowson, the original hardware designer, declined to join Castle Technology and so Peter Wild was recruited. The Iyonix PC was released six months later. Although it was well received, it was not designed for long-term production and therefore used some components that were near obsolete when it was released. A problem for the Iyonix PC was that it used

lead Lead is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metals, heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale of mineral hardness#Intermediate ...

ed components which were outlawed with the adoption of Directive 2002–95/EC in February 2003 by the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...

. However, by this time Castle Technology was financially troubled and could not afforded to re-engineer the Iyonix PC without the leaded components. The remaining Iyonix stock were passed to Iyonix Limited which stopped distribution on 30 September 2008. In 2004, Castle Technology acquired Tematic to further development of

embedded system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...

s. In December 2005, Castle Technology moved its main office to the former premises of its

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

division, following the migration of Tematic to a neighbouring premises in Signet Court,

. In 2018 RISC OS Developments acquired Castle Technology Ltd including the Intellectual Property.

References

External links

* {{RISC OS RISC OS Computer hardware companies Companies based in Cambridge