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.