CAMBRIDGE, UK -- July 24, 2003 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, today announced their partnership with SuperH Inc to deliver the eCos real-time operating system and RedBoot firmware on SuperH RISC CPU cores. The partnership will extend the existing eCos coverage of SuperH embedded development boards to include the SH-4 MicroDev Platform, enabling a wide range of developers to evaluate eCos and the SH-4 RISC CPU family for their latest embedded designs more readily.

"eCos is the premier royalty-free open source RTOS and we are pleased to partner with SuperH in making this technology more accessible to their licensees." said Alex Schuilenburg, Managing Director at eCosCentric. "The combination of eCos and RedBoot on SuperH is compelling and our commercial development and support offerings ensure that adopters have all the backup they need." said Daniel Morris, Sales & Marketing Director at eCosCentric.

The SH-4 MicroDev Platform is a modular SoC and software development platform which allows developers to prototype high performance System-on-Chip solutions. The first version of the MicroDev platform is based on the 266MHz SH4-202, 32-bit RISC CPU, that was recently qualified as Silver IP in UMC's 0.13u CMOS technology.

"When we looked around for a firmware solution for the MicroDev the natural choice seemed to us to be RedBoot which combines small footprint with rich functionality. The ability to offer our customers seamless download and debug from standard GNU based cross development tools fits into our strategy of leveraging Free Open Source Software." said Jon Frosdick, Director of Software. "In addition we are able to offer eCos availability on the MicroDev which is a great solution for our customers looking for a royalty free RTOS."

About eCosCentric
Founded in April 2002, eCosCentric is the leading provider of eCos and RedBoot support, development and consulting services worldwide. Staffed by the original eCos creators and highly experienced embedded system and software engineers, eCosCentric provides complete solutions consisting of run-time systems and complementary host tools.

For further details, please visit eCosCentric on the web at www.ecoscentric.com.

About SuperH
SuperH, Inc. is a semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) licensing company and is the leading supplier of multimedia RISC CPU cores to companies building system-on-chip (SoC) products. SuperH, Inc. develops RISC CPU cores, the SuperHyway Bus TM on-chip interconnect and software development tools. The SuperH TM family today includes the 32-bit SH-4 and 64-bit SH-5 CPU cores and is ideally suited to multimedia applications that require a single CPU core executing a mix of general purpose code and DSP algorithms. SuperH CPU cores are targeted at consumer, automotive, telecom and handheld multimedia appliance markets with specific emphasis on set top box, residential gateway, car information systems, modems, digital camera and multimedia players.

Further information about SuperH, Inc. and SuperH products can be found at www.superh.com.