The story
After Acorn withdrew from the desktop computer industry in 1998, Castle Technology acquired the rights to produce the A7000, A7000+ and RISC PC 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 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 desktop computer. 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 leaded components which were outlawed with the adoption of Directive 2002–95/EC in February 2003 by the European Union. However, by this time Castle Technology was financially troubled and could not afford 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 RISC OS in embedded systems. In December 2005, Castle Technology moved its main office to the former premises of its software development division, following the migration of Tematic to a neighbouring premises in Signet Court, Cambridge.
In 2018 RISC OS Developments acquired Castle Technology Ltd including the Intellectual Property.
From Wikipedia’s article on Castle Technology, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4