NEC announced that it has succeeded in the development of multiprocessor virtualization technology, enabling the flexible 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.

The new multiprocessor virtualization technology 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.

The technology also 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. According to NEC, 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%. NEC presents 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.