In 1992, our parent company (ADR) entered into a joint venture with the Philips New Zealand Applications Laboratory which had begun to develop and manufacture emulation and programming tools to support development of products based on Philips (and Signetics) 8048 and 8051 based microcontrollers. Our role was to provide an integrated debugging environment initially running under DOS and then under Windows.

As time passed we began to play an increasing part in the architectural and hardware design of these tools. We were also appointed official distributors for Philips Semiconductors, and in 1998 formed Acqura systems and set up an e-commerce website to market, distribute, and support Philips microcontroller development tools and other products.

In 2001 Philips New Zealand decided to close the Application Laboratory as part of a world-wide restructuring of the Philips organisation. Philips Semiconductors however recognised that the development tools we were providing were critical to their success, and an agreement was made for us to take over the business operations of the Applications Laboratory from January 2002 and to become a special supplier of development tools to Philips.

This new arrangement has proven highly successful and we now have an extremely close relationship with the various semiconductor divisions of Philips around the world responsible for the design of microcontrollers and ASIC's containing embedded microcontrollers. We now provide a significant input into the design of support for emulation within some Philips microcontrollers.

Our microcontroller development tool products are unique in being permitted to carry Philips markings and in being marketed, distributed, and backed, by Philips worldwide as official Philips-branded products.

Our emulator and programmer for the P87LPC76x has completely dominated the market for development tools for this microcontroller family, and were the first (and so far only) tools to support the extended-memory LPC77x variants. We were the only company asked to provide Philips with an emulation system for the recently-introduced flagship P89LPC900 family of microcontrollers. We were recently contracted by the Philips Competence Centre (Display Systems) in Eindhoven to exclusively develop and supply an emulation solution for an ASIC destined for use in display monitors.

We now provide emulation systems supporting a wider range of Philips microcontroller devices than any other vendor, including many devices for which we are the only source of emulation support. Being Philips-specific we offer a depth of knowledge and attention to detail unmatched by any other vendor.