Renesas Electronics America Develops New Virtualization Technology

Renesas Electronics America Inc., a provider of microcontrollers and advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers and System-on-a-Chip or ‘SoC’ solutions, has announced that it has developed a virtualization technology for its V850 CPU architecture that allocates CPU time and system resources for independent processes in a control system. The new technology significantly cuts down process interference and facilitates high-speed performance of diverse tasks, apart from enabling enhanced software configuration flexibility for single-core Microcontroller Units or ‘MCUs,’ particularly in large-scale control systems performing composite processing. Additionally, the new hardware based virtualization technology offers smoother integration and distribution of functions for more efficient software development, and enables independent parallel execution of multiple control systems on a single CPU.

The company has developed a simultaneous multithreading or ‘SMT’ technology that offers multiple thread execution in parallel, and enables allocation of dedicated program context resources such as general registers and system control registers needed for each thread or unit of software execution. A hardware scheduler automatically handles thread switching so that the software developers can determine a certain portion of CPU time to be allocated to each thread. It alleviates the CPU from performing time-management and program-switching overhead functions, and also maintains regular execution resulting in parallel implementation of multiple real-time control systems to fulfill the needs specified by the developer.

The hardware developed by Renesas Electronics has been designed to extend the management of address space and interrupt handling, so that a single CPU can run the software as multiple, virtual CPUs. The solution is equipped with an address-conversion function that enables due separation of memory, ensuring that logical addresses don’t get overlapped among virtual CPUs and memory resources are located properly. All the virtual CPUs can be assigned a single or multiple hardware thread resources; while a single thread can be assigned to each virtual CPU within a simple operating system, such as a real-time OS or ‘RTOS.’ When working in large-scale operating systems environments, developers can assign multiple threads to a single virtual CPU.

Featuring an enhanced bus system that reduces interference between threads accessing memory or peripheral units and maintains regular input/output or ‘I/O’ access by the various threads, the new technology enables the enterprises to realize I/O virtualization in control systems. Integrating all the enhanced features introduced within the new technology, developers can deploy a single CPU as multiple virtual CPUs, each running a different OS or supporting independent control systems in parallel. Additionally, the new technology also addresses various software overhead problems associated with separating or integrating control systems, and developing large-scale control systems.

In October 2010, Renesas Electronics America Inc. introduced Velocity Lab, a suite of Renesas Electronics and third-party development components designed to enable customers to develop embedded solutions quickly and cost-effectively.