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Ashling and Imagination announce Ashling’s RiscFree™ C/C++ SDK support for RISC-V-based Catapult family.

Embedded World, Mar-14 2023, Nuremberg, Germany. Ashling and Imagination Technologies announced today that Ashling’s RiscFree SDK will provide software development  support for Imagination’s Catapult RISC-V-based IP cores.  

RTXM-2200 is the first commercial, licensable CPU IP from the RISC-V Catapult family featuring a  real-time, highly scalable, 32-bit embedded design drawing on Imagination’s decades of experience  in CPU design. 

“In partnering with Ashling we are enabling support for the RiscFree SDK on our RISC-V processor cores. This means our customers will benefit from a wider range of development tools, supporting  their RISC-V-based design journey and enabling them to significantly speed up their time to market.  We are excited to grow and consolidate the Catapult RISC-V ecosystem with Ashling through both  market-leading hardware as well as comprehensive software support for future technologies in this  space,” said Peter Lewin, Director of CPU ecosystems, Imagination

RiscFree is Ashling’s SDK including an IDE, compiler and debugger and provides software  development and debug support for Catapult. Since its introduction, Ashling’s RiscFree SDK has  been steadily building market share within the embedded tools market and is particularly strong in the  RISC-V market where its ease-of-use, broad functionality, plug-in architecture and real-time trace  support have made it the go-to choice for 32-bit and 64-bit RISC core software development.  

“We are pleased to announce our support for Imagination’s recently released Catapult RISC-V CPU cores and that our RiscFree is now part of Imagination’s tools eco-system for development and debug. We look forward to further co-operation, particularly between our engineering teams to ensure that  RiscFree can leverage all the additional debugging and analysis capabilities earmarked for future  Catapult devices,” said Hugh O’Keeffe, CEO of Ashling

Ashling RiscFree SDK support for Imagination’s Catapult includes: 

  • IDE with full source & project creation, editing, build & debug support 
  • RiscFree includes a single-shot installer that installs & automatically configures all the  component tools to work “out-of-the-box” 
  • Automatic source-code formatting, syntax colouring & function folding 
  • Integrated compiler toolchain 
  • ROM or RAM based debugging support (e.g. hardware breakpoints for flash based support) 
  • Integrated QEMU ISA simulator  
  • Support for other industry standard instruction & cycle accurate simulators High-level RISC-V register viewer  
  • Integrated RTOS (e.g. FreeRTOS or Zephyr) & OS (e.g. Linux) debug support. Project wizards, templates & examples  

For more information on Ashling’s RiscFree see: https://www.ashling.com/ashling-riscv/ and for  details on Imagination’s Catapult see https://www.imaginationtech.com/products/cpu/

About Ashling  

Ashling have been a leading provider of Embedded Development Tools & Services since 1982 with  design centres in Limerick Ireland and Kochi India and sales and support offices in Europe, Asia  Pacific, the Middle East and America. Visit www.ashling.com for more details. 

About Imagination 

Imagination is a UK-based company that creates silicon and software IP (intellectual property) designed to give  its customers an edge in competitive global technology markets. Its GPU, CPU, and AI technologies enable  outstanding power, performance, and area (PPA), fast time-to-market, and lower total cost of ownership.  Products based on Imagination IP are used by billions of people across the globe in their smartphones, cars,  homes, and workplaces. See https://www.imaginationtech.com/.  

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Imagination Technologies’ Press Contacts:  

David Harold david.harold@imgtec.com +44 (0)1923 260 511 

Cosmin Balan cosmin.balan@imgtec.com +44 (0)1923 260 511 

Imagination, PowerVR, and the Imagination Technologies logo are trademarks of Imagination Technologies  Limited and/or its affiliated group companies in the United Kingdom and/or other countries. All other logos,  products, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 

About RISC-V 

The RISC-V open architecture ISA is under the governance of the RISC-V International. Visit  https://riscv.org for more details. 

Ashling Contact 

Nadim Shehayed, VP of Business Development 

nadim.shehayed@ashling.com 

Imagination Contact 

Peter Lewin, Director of CPU ecosystems 

peter.lewin@imgtec.com 

All trademarks, logos and brand names are the property of their respective owners.