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Message: NEC touts embedded devices coordination technology

NEC touts embedded devices coordination technology

posted on Oct 04, 2007 11:58AM

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 10/4/2007

Japan-based NEC Corp. has developed a multiprocessor dynamic-control technology that it claims allows embedded devices to coordinate with each other through open networks such as the Internet.

However, the technology is far from a marketplace debut. NEC's research result was presented by the company on Monday at the international conference on hardware/software co-design and system synthesis, CODES+ISSS, which was held in Salzburg, Austria. NEC received the best paper award at CODES+ISSS for the paper it presented on the research.

NEC said it is targeting the technology for application with embedded devices like mobile phones, digital home electronics and automotive information devices. NEC said the technology addresses what has been a greater need in recent years for embedded devices to satisfy highly scalable performance and high security requirements for device coordination. According to NEC, the technology could lead to new services based on device coordination; the company gave examples such as an anti-crime service that is linked with a child's mobile phone and a town's monitoring cameras, an auto-payment service that coordinates with customers' information terminals and restaurants' point-of-sales devices, and a driver-assist service that coordinates with drive recorders and car navigation systems.

In the technology, NEC said, the number of processors for device coordination can be changed freely in response to the required performance without fixed allocation of all processors to pre-installed software. Also, pre-installed software can be protected from device driver bugs or attacks of malicious software during device coordination operation on open networks as a hardware monitor blocks the malicious access issued to memory or I/Os for device coordination. Due to the hardware monitor, the performance overhead of pre-installed software is reduced to "almost nothing," NEC claimed.

News of the research indicates that NEC has not slowed down its moves on the technology front, despite recent troubles it has had on its business side. Last month, NEC disclosed that its stock was in danger of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock market because it has failed to file some required forms to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); a week after that announcement, Nasdaq indeed halted trading of the company's shares. The company's reports to the SEC have been delayed in party by an NEC investigation into a recently discovered history of fraudulent transactions committed by several NEC employees. NEC's shares continue to be traded on the Japanese markets.

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