Quoting from NEC's announcement

NEC Corporation announced that it has succeeded in the development of multiprocessor virtualization technology, enabling the flexible and secure installation of a wide variety of application software on electronic devices in accordance with user needs, without causing any harm to the operation of the pre-installed application software for basic functions. This technology is aimed at making devices such as mobiles phones, digital electronics and automotive information systems more multi-functional.

1.  The new multiprocessor virtualization technology is based on NEC's proprietary multiprocessor technology for embedded systems and includes the following features:
Achieves the separation of the application software for basic functions, which was initially installed on the device, and groups of application software that have been added at a later date by the user through the allocation of both to different processors. These processors are then further separated into virtual processors according to the characteristics of the application software. Virtual separation succeeds in avoiding interference among the groups of application software, thereby allowing a greater number of diverse groups of application software to be flexibly and securely installed on embedded devices.

2.  Enables a high level of security even among added applications as the hardware monitors the access to the memory or inter-processor communication among the virtual processors. This results in significantly enhanced system performance as compared with conventional methods, which only realize virtual processors with software. Furthermore, switching time between application software has been cut by 50%.

In recent years, embedded devices such as cell phones, digital home electronics and automotive information systems have faced the installation of diverse groups of application software post-purchase in accordance with increasingly diverse user needs. This has lead to a greater need for the installation of application software on embedded devices to satisfy high security, flexibility and high performance requirements. NEC's new multiprocessor virtualization technology allows multiple independent processors to be virtually built on top of actual processors, allowing an increase in groups of application software for installation, while eliminating interference among the added groups of software.

NEC has been promoting intensive research on multiprocessor technologies, which help provide high performance and low power dissipation to embedded systems, and expects its new multiprocessor virtualization technology will contribute to the enhanced performance of multi-functional devices, vital to a networked society.

NEC will present this research work on July 26, 2006 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) being held in San Francisco, California from July 24 to July 28, 2006.

For additional information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec.com